Another company is taking on the elusive goal of capturing more instant meetings bookings, especially as small meetings demand continues an upward trajectory into 2025. Amsterdam-based Meetingselect has partnered with Shiji property management system to enable hotels and venues that use Shiji Enterprise Platform with a white-labeled instant-booking widget for meetings on their own websites in addition to offering content through the Meetingselect application.
The widget allows properties operating on the Shiji platform to define what meeting spaces to include in the instant-book offering and to combine and recombine spaces, guest rooms, catering and other meeting elements for special package pricing. It also offers settings that facilitate dynamic and other pricing schemes to support revenue management objectives. The instant-booking features integrate directly into the PMS to ensure real-time visibility into inventory.
The Meetingselect-Shiji agreement is the latest evolution among a number of self-serve meetings booking technologies that offer an instant-booking option. Cvent launched its current instant-booking option in spring 2023; Groups360 has had instant bookings since February 2023 and, like Meetingselect, also enables hotel brands to offer instant booking on their websites; Dublin-headquartered Hubli introduced Venue Connect in fall 2023, shortly after Office Connect, which works with clients’ office spaces.
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In research released this spring, BTN reported that just 2 percent of respondents had utilized instant-booking meeting tools. Lack of “special request” capability—or other details that generally get worked out in the request-for-proposals and contracting process—was one factor for the lack of use. The other was on the supplier side, where revenue managers weren’t keen to include the venue’s most significant spaces in an instant-booking format, preferring to hold the space for multiple bids and maximize potential revenue.
Shiji’s flexible pricing settings might address some of this hesitancy for a supplier. For a buyer, however, knowing when instant bookings will be part of the buying opportunity and when it won’t will be a difficult detail to navigate, since adoption of such tech is often decided at a property-by-property approach and not at the brand or chain level.
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Correction Nov. 1, 3:35pm: A previous version of this story indicated the Shiji PMS integration was the first time Meetingselect had integrated for live content. Meetingselect has offered live content since 2020.