te chn olo gy with the properties they are using. InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG) has launched a new meetings and events booking tool across 23 of its Australian and New Zealand properties, giving meeting attendees a way to book their hotel rooms and planners a more efficient process to work with IHG hotels.
If you’re appy and you know it Apps are being developed by a wider spectrum of sectors servicing the events industry in a push to bring event organisers, their clients and delegates closer together, writes Sheridan Randall.
There will come a time when we’ll ask, how did we manage without apps? That tipping point may already be on us, as more apps are launched to cater to the different needs of event planners and delegates alike. Event organisers are already asking for more apps catering for exhibitor and delegate interaction, as well as live integration to global distribution systems to access accommodation inventory from hotels, according to Lauren Hall, CEO of software developer iVvy. “For the last three to four years the landscape of event management has been changing, with a greater demand for accessibility to information with one source,” says Hall. “By bringing data to a central point, it ensures greater efficiencies and productivity levels.” The rise in event specific apps and software is changing the way events run, she adds, with more hybrid events, new billing models for PCOs, and greater transparency within the industry between suppliers, organisers and corporations. Staging Connections, already established in terms of event management and services, has just released a new app, IStageEvent, as part of its push into the digital events sector. IStageEvent has been designed to allow event organisers and exhibitors to better
engage their potential audience at every touch point and receive realtime data about their delegates’ behaviour at events and provide immediate feedback. “It’s a combination of a few products that are part of the broader hybrid events sector, which expands the reach of the natural audience,” says Tim Chapman, general manager digital event services at Staging Connections. In collaboration with Staging Connection’s 70 venue partners across Australia, Chapman says that the firm has “got a finger on the pulse” of what organisers want. “We’ve had a lot of assistance at the venue level saying wouldn’t it good if… and we finished the sentence with a product that would fit that purpose.” The app includes a calendar, map, exhibitor listings and details, messaging functions, speaker information and scheduling, and is designed to “allow people to interact before, during and after an event”. “One of the coolest parts of the app is that attendees can message each other prior to the event,” he says. “What we are finding is that attendees are getting quite savvy these days in that they really want to maximise their time at event. You can turn up to an event that has multiple schedules with five or six breakout sessions happening
at the same time. What the app allows you to do is create your own personalised schedule with alarms to keep you on track.” With some in the events industry questioning what future face-toface events have in an increasingly digital world, Chapman remains optimistic, declaring “long live the live event”. “We want live events to get bigger. A very interesting trend on a global level is emerging. Event organisers think that whenever you turn an event into a hybrid [with webcasts] people won’t come, [instead] they’ll stay at their desks and watch it. However, what we have found is that those watching it on their computers feel quite alienated when the breaks occur, as that’s when they’re normally out chatting to people and networking and all that. When the registrations come out for the same event the next time, 50 per cent of those that watched it previously as a webcast are the first to book. “Virtual events, rather than detracting from a live audience, are actually building it so that the money they got from the people watching the webcast pays for them going to a bigger room next year.” Hotels are also jumping on the app bandwagon in an effort to help not just event organisers but also guests have greater control over their relationship
16 Convention & Incentive Marketing, November 2012 www.cimmagazine.com
The GroupMAX app, a reservations technology developed by US-based Passkey which has already been rolled out in the US and is set to be launched in South East Asia in the near future, allows hotels, event planners and delegates to fully automate their group reservations process and features live event tracking, automated room lists and an integrated email marketing platform. Piloted in the first half of the year across six of IHG’s key meetings and events hotels, the group “had really positive feedback from the predominantly corporate meeting planners that used the tool during the pilot period”, according to Anne Gill, IHG director, commercial, Australasia. “We are always looking at ways we can add value to the meetings experience across our brands and given the changes in technology, this tool is particularly good because not only is it a booking engine, it also has a mobile application and integrates some social network components that meeting organisers and guests can use when they are at the actual event,” Gill says. “The system has a great suite of dashboards and reports that mean from a hotel perspective we can go in at any time and look at the pickup of rooms. Traditionally meeting organisers send us a rooming list 21 days out if we’re lucky, and although you’re checking with organisers leading up to the event about how the room sales are going you really don’t know until you get that rooming list. Using this, hotels have a much better line of sight as to what the pick-up and pace of that particular block is and can better work with the organiser so that if the block is slow to pick-up perhaps reduce the block and so avoid cancellation fees, or if the pace is fast talk to the organiser about adding more rooms into the block. It absolutely works for both of us.” Expected to be particularly useful for smaller corporate events that “aren’t using a full blown PCO”, Gill anticipates that those PCOs looking to upgrade their technology may prefer to use GroupMAX to run events at IHG properties, instead of outlaying further investment.