Using MeetingsBooker to increase revenue (Interview with Founder Ciaran Delaney)

From time to time I like to profile startups in the travel industry – to help you see who could be the big players of tomorrow.

I’ve known Ciaran through our blogs and Twitter for some time, and when I heard he was traveling from Dublin to San Francisco I jumped at the chance to meetup at one of my favorite coffee spots here in the city.

For this interview, we discussed his new project, MeetingsBooker, and talked a little bit about how it can be used to increase your hotel’s meeting room revenue. Let’s get started!

Meetings Booker Homepage

As a former hotel sales and marketing director, tell us a little bit about your experience with the selling meeting rooms: Is the traditional process is flawed? What inspired you to start this company?

I was marketing director of a 1,000 room hotel near Dublin. My challenge was there were very few sites delivering meeting room bookings for us. Lots of sites provide RFPs, but these were also being sent to all my competitors so success was hit and miss. Also, I didn’t have anything on my own website to capture small meeting room sales leads or present special offers. I didn’t have the tools – there was only an inquiry form.

And then from the customer’s point of view: when I tried to book meeting rooms myself, the process was slow. The whole process of contacting hotels for pricing, then waiting to hear back from them took a long time.

Can you tell me a little bit about how your website solves these problems?

We let the end-users see a hotel’s meeting room rates instantly. Whether it’s London Heathrow, Amsterdam, or Barcelona — our users can search for dates and details and get immediate pricing. It enables them to easily shop around and book meeting rooms online in a few minutes.

Hotels can manage availability and receive immediate live bookings or provide instant online quotes. From the hotel’s perspective, when one of our website users contacts them it’s more than an inquiry — the customers already know all the details of the rooms, distance from the city, amenities, and meeting room hire special offers — and they are ready to make a booking. They’ve already made their decision on where they want to hold their meeting.

We offer the MeetingsBooker.com software for placement on the hotel’s own website. For the hotel’s sales director, it greatly reduces management time. Hotels can choose from our live meeting room booking engine with live availability or our instant quote system.

The average size of group that books on our website is 40 attendees. These smaller meetings are often the most frequent and time-consuming for the hotel. By using our software on the hotels website, the hotel’s sales team can spend more time with larger conference business, which is more profitable. The software also offers hotels meeting room yield management options. For example, if you notice Monday and Fridays are quiet days for you, you can increase revenue by offering a 15% discount for meeting rooms on those quiet days. It’s the same thing you would do with bedrooms.

Are there other benefits for hotels using your service?

The main benefit we offer hotels are meeting room bookings. In addition to this, we tend to get good natural search engine rankings for the cities we operate in, so hotels that add themselves to our website get extra visibility online. Hotels that have joined us have also noticed an increase in phone calls as a part of being on the site.

We also offer the ability to set up a loyalty program. For example if a customer spends over $2000, they might qualify for a booker reward e.g. an overnight gift voucher.

Do you have any examples of hotels that are using your service?

Holiday Inn – Leeds:

Park Plaza Belfast:

What is the process for getting started?

Hotels can begin using our website for free. They can actually begin the setup themselves… it’s a simple process. Many nation-wide hotel chains are using us, and they often do the setup at the property level. Just click on “Register for free” on our homepage and follow the instructions.

We only charge once hotels begin receiving bookings. We charge $500 (€390) for a one year listing once they receive over $650 (€450) in confirmed bookings. Our average booking is over €1000 so this fee quickly pays for itself. For hotels that want our software on their own websites, we charge a small annual license fee.

How do you plan to expand over the coming year?

We’re expanding quickly in Europe: UK, Ireland, Spain, Holland and Germany. We plan to focus on the major cities…and especially airport hotels [we get a lot of airport hotel business as a large proportion of our bookers are business travellers]. In the US, we are building a customer base in San Francisco, Chicago, and Boston. In Asia, were expanding through a partner we have there.

Thanks for your time, Ciaran – and best of luck with your venture!

[You can list your property for free here]

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