Competition Heats Up for Small Meetings Tech

This week, small meetings booking technology Bizly will introduce a messaging platform designed for more complex bookings, as well as a management app for enterprise clients to manage approvals and track both booking activity and small meetings spend. The platform allows clients to input preferred properties and rates, where applicable, and to implement requirements for and track competitive offers.

Founder and CEO Ron Shah told BTN that Bizly has focused its sights on corporate contracts rather than growth via individual user adoption. After analyzing the early data, Shah said, "We had a couple of big companies do a lot of repeat business, and so we started to talk to them." What Shah didn't find was repeat business from individual users. "A general consumer doesn't need meeting space every day, so by the time you market to them and they're like, 'Oh wow, this is great,' you still have to keep marketing until they actually need it. And then by the time they use it, they just don't need it again for a while. So, the repeat rate and the marketing cycle just weren't very attractive."

To grab the corporate customer, though, Bizly had some work to do. First, it had to grow its content base a lot. Shah said Bizly has done that, moving from 300 curated venues on the platform to more than 10,000. It also plans to launch content in international markets by year-end. Meanwhile, Bizly had to incorporate management tools in order to capture and then feed back to the client all the small meetings and events spend that gets lost on corporate cards when ad hoc meeting organizers "do their own thing," said Shah. That meant beefing up reporting tools and administration interfaces. Bizly now integrates a meetings calendar, approval routing and preferred rates at hotel properties and can slice and dice data per meeting organizer, per department or team and per date range.

Yet the platform maintains its consumer feel, and none of the admin levers are required. "We want to focus on adoption first with a great user experience; then the administration piece can fall in line," Shah said. Bizly claims the content is still "curated" by on-the-ground planners, though Shah also claimed it will represent "basically every high-quality hotel, restaurant, bowling alley with full service … vineyards, beachside resorts … all of the relevant inventory three to five star and above." Unlike global distribution system and website content, Bizly requires venues to show all group spaces. It tags each venue and space by lifestyle descriptions like "modern" or "charming." Shah said "deep-search" capability allows users to input detailed parameters like "hip venue for high-end dinner for 10 in New York City," and the platform will return relevant results.

Above all, Bizly is not an RFP platform, and that is key to driving end-user adoption, according to Shah. "Literally no one enjoys using RFPs," he said. "Hotels waste billions of dollars responding to RFPs with a less than 1 percent conversion. Customers don't hear back from the venues they really want. It's a really painful process."

Instead, adding to its original "instant book" capability, Bizly's new messaging platform enables meeting planners to message hotel staff directly so they can build customized small meetings and events collaboratively, without the RFP. The venue contact can share packages and images and negotiate the deal, and the two parties can come to an agreement. Bizly's offering supports guest room bookings direct with the properties. "It's all tracked on the messaging thread," where venues create "shopping carts" for customers as they work through details, said Shah. Competing carts can live in the system until the meeting planner accepts one.

Though Shah bills Bizly's new capabilities as "the meeting industry's first messaging platform," the function sounds similar to that offered by small meetings technology firm Groupize, which introduced "magic email" last year. Like Bizly, Groupize offers two meeting planning tracks. First, on its booking engine for events with less than 10 guest rooms, meeting organizers message the target hotels to negotiate deals, exchange attachments, etc. Groupize's second track is more of a sourcing tool for meetings with more than 10 guest rooms. Unlike Bizly's curated approach, Groupize draws content largely from the GDS. Another difference is that Bizly generally focuses on hospitality events like day meetings, dinners and entertainment. Shah previously told BTN that "companies are fairly well situated in how they handle room nights" and that Bizly didn't want to insert itself in that process.

But things change quickly for startups, and Bizly is working hard to keep up with its new strategy to focus on the enterprise client. Groupize's clean integration with Concur is a competitive advantage, but Bizly's hospitality approach and slick user interface that offers up sophisticated, short-turn meeting and event space may serve just enough of a niche to segment the market.