Cvent has launched the beta version of a portal designed to
allow users to analyze trends about the billions of dollars of group business
meeting opportunities that have flowed through Cvent's sourcing tools over the
past four years. Designed for suppliers but available to planners and others, the
free Group Business Trends portal, available at www.cvent.com/GroupTrends, allows
users to query the RFP database using a variety of filters to identify trends like
group average daily rates by location, chain or event types; explore RFP
details by booking window or size; compare meeting destinations by planner
location; and explore sales behaviors like RFP response time, degree of
flexibility and turndown rate. The initial release includes data on RFP traffic
by quarter from the past four years for 44 markets and more than 62 million
data combinations, and Cvent plans to add additional markets, as well as quarterly
updates.
In 2015, planners sourced $9.8 billion in meetings and
events through the Cvent Supplier Network of more than 240,000 hotels, resorts
and event venues in 175 countries. Analyzing quarterly trends, Cvent found that
"group rates in North America have appreciated by roughly 5 percent
compound annual growth rate," and that "Q3 is generally slow,"
with a consistent drop from the second quarter to the third quarter. "This
seasonal trend is largely due to Southeast and Southwest U.S. hotels."
The portal is Cvent's first initiative in a
broader plan to create dashboards for property-specific analytics, which would
be offered on a fee basis to suppliers, similar to reports that STR offers on
transient business trends to help hoteliers benchmark their performance against
others in a market or a specific competitive set. "Now hoteliers will have
the opportunity to gain valuable insights into group business trends and
interact with the data in new ways," said Kevin Fliess, vice president of
product marketing for Cvent's Hospitality Cloud.