MICE: will conference spaces soon be booked online?
Hotel rooms can be booked in a matter of minutes. For conferences for 50 people, the process often still starts with an email, a spreadsheet, and waiting for a quote. The new Destigo Business platform shows that MICE sales are slowly moving towards the model we have already seen with individual hotel reservations.
On October 19th, the Polish hotel group Destigo Hotels launched Destigo Business, a platform that brings together the conference and event offerings of the properties in its portfolio in one place. Organizers can filter hotels by location, capacity of the halls, parking facilities, wellness facilities, or type of destination, and send a request to a specific hotel or the central sales department.
This is not yet a fully online conference booking system. But it is a step towards it.
Destigo digitalizes the search and RFP process
Destigo Business primarily solves one of the slowest parts of MICE sales: finding the right space and sending out requests.
A particularly interesting feature is useful for organizers planning multiple events. One inquiry can be sent to the central sales team for multiple locations, instead of the agency contacting each hotel separately.
The benefit for the hotel group is equally clear. The sales team no longer has to maintain a series of different presentations and documents, but instead uses a centralized source of data on the conference offer. Destigo also announces the integration of the platform with event content on the individual hotel websites.
However, there is an important difference between such a system and actual instant bookings. Destigo Business allows for searching and submitting requests, but the price, availability, and final confirmation still go through the sales process.
Part of the market is already going one step further
In some European markets, this step has already been taken.
Through the Book it Easy platform, Radisson Hotels enables real-time check of availability and prices, as well as immediate confirmation of smaller meetings, groups and events. The system is currently available, among others, in Austria, Poland and Romania. Reservations can also be commissionable for travel advisors and meeting professionals, subject to meeting defined conditions.
Groups360 goes even further. Its GroupSync connects with hotel systems and allows real-time availability and group pricing to be displayed, while at some hotels rooms, meeting space, catering and AV can be confirmed in a single online transaction. According to the company, instant booking currently covers more than one million rooms in approximately 30,000 hotels.
Here we are already approaching the logic that travelers have known about for years when booking leisure travel: search, compare, select, and confirm.
For agencies, automation can be both an opportunity and a competitor.
The biggest benefit for MICE agencies is time.
If the system can immediately show the capacity of the hall, accommodation, availability, basic package and price, the agent does not have to wait for the answers from five hotels to prepare the first comparison for the client.
In simpler meetings, this can significantly shorten the sales cycle.
At the same time, the same tool can be used by a corporate client without an intermediary. Therefore, digitalized MICE sales for hotel groups opens up another direct channel to companies and event managers.
This is where an interesting new division will emerge. Simple meetings with defined packages will all be easier to sell online. Complex congresses, incentive programs, and events with transportation, production, multiple hotels, and additional services will still require agency expertise and coordination.
Technology therefore probably won't eliminate MICE intermediaries. But it could eliminate much of the administration that today consumes time.
For the markets of Croatia, Slovenia, and the rest of the Adriatic region, it will be particularly interesting to watch when local hotels begin offering real availability and immediate confirmation of conference spaces, rather than just an online inquiry form. When this happens, hotel distribution will gain another segment in which the boundary between traditional sales and e-commerce will be seriously blurred.
