Meetingsbooker offers white-label booking system
Dublin-based Meetingsbooker is now providing venues via a white-label booking system. The service began operating earlier this year and now has almost 500 hotels and conference venues on its books. The company charges a small transaction fee per booking, with no fixed costs for the venue. The tool, added via a piece of javascript, allows venues to vary meeting room hire costs based on a range of variables including occupancy levels and room type. There are also options to allow customised branding. Meetingsbooker CEO, Ciaran Delaney says the company will add language localisation later this year and continue enhancing its automated booking system.

There's been a lot of action of late in the events and meetings sector. Adding to the mix is news aimed at smaller hotels and venues.

Meetingsbooker, the Dublin-based meeting room marketplace, is now providing venues with a white-label booking system.

Meetingsbooker began providing its tool earlier this year. It has almost 500 hotels and conference venues signed up.

Based on that early usage, the company estimates that, with its white-label engine, 65% of users will start a search versus 15% using an enquiry form. Once a user starts the process, 8% make a booking, on average.

For this free engine, the company charges a small transaction fee, per booking, with no fixed costs for the venue. The company says the tool includes a meeting room yield management tool that allows venues to vary meeting room hire rates based on occupancy, lead-time and room type -- with lots of customization potential for branding, invoicing, and other common concerns. It's a bit of javascript code that venues can add to their websites.

The tool is relatively new for the industry. Meetingsmaker, the UK-based SaaS tech provider, has a similar one.

Meetingsbooker was founded in 2009, during the the severe Irish recession, as a one-person shop. In late 2014 it raised Euro 1 million in investment from ACT Venture, Delta, Enterprise Ireland, and angel investors.

It has since grown its listing of meeting spaces worldwide by about 30%, to 70,000 meeting spaces worldwide. The strategy of aiming for the broadest selection of venues has paid dividends and kept the marketing costs down, the company says.

During its effort at adding inventory, it had an office in San Francisco. But it has since centralized its operations in Dublin, where it has 14 full-time employees. It has also rolled out a new site and automated bookings.

CEO Ciaran Delaney says his company will launch language localization in the fourth quarter of this year, and it will continue to build out the functionality of its automated booking system (e.g. yield management).

The startup faces competition from a set of players competing in different portions of the broad meetings-and-events sector. In the smaller automated bookings space Book2Meet.com is the most immediate name that comes to mind.

Overall, the event and meetings sector, writ large, has had a lot of activity of late.

Last year Groupize, a Boston-based travel tech startup, debuted a corporate group booking tool for hotels.

Startups such as Bird Office, Bizly, Breather, and Splacer are hoping to apply the Airbnb-style on-demand model to event listings.

Yesterday: Etouches acquires Zentila, as event management consolidates further

Earlier this month: Technology-focused private equity group Accel-KKR has acquired a stake in Cendyn, a provider of B2B technology for hotel marketing and event management.