"Traditionally you can book in the GDS up to nine rooms
in a single booking; after that it's considered a group and it goes to a different
process," Groupize founder and CEO Charles de Gaspe Beaubien told the
audience at BTN's recent Strategic Meetings Summit. That's the technical reason,
until now, that the Groupize app could offer its Instant Book option only to
groups that required fewer than 10 sleeping rooms and no meeting space. "But
we are trying to change the model so the hotel can give you a rate code and
they can load the inventory behind it," he said. "Whether
that's a hundred rooms at that rate code a static price or a discount off price or even more
rooms, and we're going to book directly against that code."
That model is the startup's vision for a new feature it
calls Instant Block. It's part of a companion feature called Event Booking
Pages where corporate clients build a white-label landing page for an ongoing
purpose like recruitment, training meetings, project teams and special events.
De Gaspe Beaubien said the new features answer client demand for more efficient
processes when it comes to event setup in the Groupize client portal. With
event pages, the build-once environment allows clients to tweak settings and
configure hotel selections or groups of hotels associated with an event and add
Instant Block selections when they've negotiated that option with their target
properties.
So what size meeting is the limit? De Gaspe Beaubien
indicated that the size of the meeting doesn't matter; it's really just
complexity. "A board meeting for five VIPs? That's not a simple
meeting; that has to be high touch," he said. "But we are working on a simple meeting for 60,000
attendees right now in the Groupize tool."
While the new features won't be a fit for every type of
user, de Gaspe Beaubien noted, "we have a client that is producing 100
meetings a week, all with real-time booking to Concur. They are using Event
Booking Pages and Instant Block to gain efficiencies in their processes"
by not having to start event setups from scratch and by not having to exchange
manual rooming lists with their host properties.
While the Meetings Summit audience met the concept with a warm reception, hotels have a rocky track record
of loading the correct inventory and rate codes into the GDS. One audience member asked how that process had been going on the supply side and whether the
hotel community, in general, had taken well to the idea. De Gaspe Beaubien
admitted the processes was new and that he would have to take a wait-and-see
approach. As an interim indicator, however, he pointed to a pair of clients that had
enough confidence in the model to push more than $150 million worth of meetings
business combined through the new system. Along with the new technology
features, Groupize also has integrated ghost card and virtual card capabilities
into the Groupize platform.
Earlier this year, Groupize established a tight,
two-way integration with Concur Travel and expects to gain a client windfall
when Concur shutters Concur Meetings on Jan. 1.