"From a hospitality perspective, we're uniquely positioned to bring our planners and suppliers together," said Cvent co-founder and CEO Reggie Aggarwal at the Cvent Connect conference, where the company celebrated its 20th anniversary. He added that 2019 projections are for $19 billion of meetings business to flow through the company's system, representing 3 million RFPs and 47 million room nights. This compares to 2018 figures of $16 billion of meetings business, 2.6 million RFPs and 42 million room nights.
Aggarwal avowed that technology is here, it's accelerating and it's pervasive across the entire event life cycle, so it needs to be a core competency for both planners and hoteliers. To help in that department, the company is bringing some of its multiple products together—and at the conference it introduced a number of new and soon-to-be available features for its Event Cloud products, which serve meeting and event planners. Enhancements include:
Flex: Cvent formally launched this redesigned platform last year for planners to create websites, run registration and manage event emails. Flex currently covers about 72 percent of Cvent customer events, which means 28 percent of customers are still on the Classic platform because at least one of the features they need is not available yet. Cvent has doubled its investment in the project and brought on more developers to quicken the pace of bringing Flex up to speed for all users. Cvent will roll out new features over the coming months, aiming for Flex to cover 92 percent of all events and encompassing all the features those users need by the end of the year. Features to serve the remaining 8 percent of events will roll out in 2020.
Social Tables: Last year, Cvent purchased this company, which has mapped more than 5 billion square feet of meeting and event spaces. Cvent customers can currently go to Social Tables to see these interactive floor plans and 3D diagramming. Suppliers now can offer this functionality directly in the Cvent Supplier Network, through which planners source venues for their meetings and events. Fairmont Hotels will be the first hotel company to make this live in the Cvent Supplier Network.
Discover: This new tab in the Cvent Supplier Network showcases curated content from both supplier partners and Cvent and it can be accessed by keyword search. For example, type in a destination and results returned will include links to lists of branded hotels in that location on the Cvent network (such as a Hilton link or a Marriott link), content provided by the destination, even Cvent blog posts that include content related to that location, such as if any properties were included in Cvent's 2019 Top Meeting Hotels list. It has moved from beta and is now generally available.
Passkey: Enhancements to this automated room block management solution include improved wait-list functionality and public block request through participating lodging partners, even if the planner is not a Passkey client directly. Passkey users have asked for more modern, more efficient experience for attendees, and Cvent will release the first iteration of new booking sites this year. The bulk of enhancements, not detailed, will arrive in 2020.
Enterprise Portals: The portals now provide a single access point for sharing information with key stakeholders who are not logging into the Cvent product. Cvent has streamlined its meeting request form to make it more intuitive for planners and has made it fully customizable, offering more sub-questions. Early adopters are testing these functions, and Cvent plans to launch them this year. The portals also will have instant booking capability for users to source venues and to book sleeping and meeting rooms from hotel inventory, and planners will be able to integrate hotel spend directly into their budgets. Meanwhile, an event hub will provide occasional planners with the ability to streamline attendee and budget maintenance. Post event, the hubs will allow planners to distribute surveys to attendees and to reconcile budgets. Cvent will continue to build event hub and small meetings solutions through 2020.
Speaker Resource Center: This new platform gives speakers the ability to self-manage their content. Planners can assign tasks to them, so speakers themselves can update session descriptions and titles. Speakers can upload presentation content, as well as their bios and headshots. The planning team has full oversight and can see when tasks are completed and which ones are still missing. It's in early-adopter phase now and will be generally available by the end of the year at no additional cost for clients who have a Cvent enterprise license.
Exhibitor Resource Center: Similar to the speaker resource center, this product will enable exhibitors to manage their tasks, forms and waivers; to register exhibitor booth staff; and to manage their profile and company logo. This tool will enter early-adopter phase before the end of the year and will be included for all Cvent customers.
CrowdCompass: Cvent now owns three services for meeting planners to create mobile event apps and is creating a single app that takes the best of each. However, Cvent will continue to support the current three through 2020. For CrowdCompass, its main app service, Cvent will enhance its live Q&A, polling and survey capabilities. Cvent also will enhance the app's security and improve the app's generation of key event and mobile app engagement. There's also now a central hub for attendee needs. Event attendees using event apps created through CrowdCompass now can personalize the info they need and can surface relevant content when in a certain session, such as a live poll or question, rather than searching through the app to find it. These features are currently available.