Meetings, Events, and a Ride in a Trabi: A Conversation with VenueSuite at ITB Berlin

At ITB Berlin, Simone Puorto squeezed into the back of a Trabi XXL with Ralph Van Hooijdonk, Founder and CEO of VenueSuite, for a conversation about meetings and events technology, the state of M&E distribution, and why the industry has been so slow to apply revenue management logic beyond the guestroom. The Trabi XXL is the iconic East German car in its stretched limo version, cruising between the exhibition hall and the Olympic Stadium.

MICE has been the forgotten corner of hotel revenue

The conversation started with a shared observation: meetings and events have been treated as a side note for decades. Rooms got the attention, the tools, and the revenue management sophistication. M&E got a static form on the website and a promise to get back to you within a few days.

Ralph confirmed this without hesitation. The effort required to book and manage a meeting or event has always been out of proportion to the revenue it generates, which is exactly why hotels focused their energy elsewhere. But that equation is shifting. Square meter revenue is getting harder to ignore, and the expectation from corporate bookers, who are often repeat customers with preferred venues, has changed. They want to book themselves, on their own schedule, and they will not wait.

The RFP problem is a starting point problem

The core issue VenueSuite is addressing is straightforward: when a booking request comes in with incomplete information, everything that follows is reactive. Back and forth emails, missing details, delayed proposals, and eventually a booker who has already moved on to the next property on their list.

By giving bookers a self-service booking engine that captures all the relevant attributes upfront, including space, F&B, AV requirements and availability, VenueSuite turns the process around. The booker does most of the work. The hotel can send a branded proposal in two or three clicks. According to their own benchmarking, 50 to 60 percent of clients are now responding within half an hour. The industry average, where a static contact form and a follow-up email chain is still the norm, is measured in days.

Demand-based pricing comes to M&E

At ITB Berlin, VenueSuite announced demand-based pricing for meetings and events within its direct booking engine. The idea is simple: the same logic that has driven room revenue management for years, adjusting rates based on demand, now applies to meeting spaces. High-demand days like Thursdays, which are chronically overbooked in the M&E segment, hold their rate. Lower-demand days are priced more attractively to stimulate bookings that might otherwise go elsewhere.

It is a first step toward full dynamic pricing for M&E, which Ralph acknowledged is still further down the road. But the direction is clear: meeting spaces, F&B packages, and event inventory should eventually be managed with the same precision as guestrooms. Early results from clients already testing the feature show more interest in lower-demand dates without compromising peak-day rates.

The revenue manager's role is changing

The conversation ended with a question about where revenue management is heading. Ralph's view: systems will make more and more of the decisions, and the revenue manager's job will shift toward supervision and strategy. Overruling a system trained on large amounts of data requires real confidence and expertise. The day-to-day execution will increasingly be automated. The human role becomes one of setting direction and stepping in when the data alone is not enough.