The event booking you lost before you knew about it
By the time your hotel events team sits down to write a proposal, the booking may already be gone. Another venue replied first, and the planner moved on.
Event planners routinely contact multiple venues at once. Research from G2 puts the number at up to ten. The first venue that comes back with something useful starts to feel like the obvious choice. The others become contingencies, and contingencies rarely get signed.
What the numbers mean
Findings by iVvy Event & Venue Management Software puts the average event contract at a value of $18,901. At modest enquiry volumes, say three bookings a month, that’s around $680,000 a year flowing through a hotel’s event spaces. Between 35% and 50% of event bookings go to the first venue that responds.
That range is worth sitting with. At the conservative end, a third of annual event revenue is at least partially determined by how quickly a team responds to an enquiry. At the higher end, it’s closer to half.
Speed is not the only factor in winning a booking. But for a significant share of enquiries, it’s the first filter. Venues that don’t clear it don’t get to compete on the others.
What planners experience on the other end
Most hotel events teams are working through a venue enquiry process that takes longer than it should.
An enquiry arrives. Someone checks space availability, then catering capacity, then pricing against the right rate structure. A proposal gets drafted, reviewed, formatted and sent. If any of those steps requires a conversation, a login to a separate system, or waiting for a colleague to be free, the clock keeps running.
For the planner, each of those internal steps registers as waiting. Planners with shorter planning windows, which is increasingly most of them, with many corporate events now confirmed within three to six months of the date, don’t have much tolerance for waiting when nine other venues are in their inbox.
Where delays come from
Most slow responses trace back to structural issues. Enquiries arrive across multiple channels with no clear ownership, so they sit until someone picks them up. Building a quote requires pulling information from systems that don’t communicate with each other. When the person who usually handles enquiries is busy, the process stalls.
This tends to be the default operating condition for hotel events teams running on systems built for record-keeping rather than speed. The friction becomes so embedded in the workflow that it gets treated as normal rather than as a problem worth solving.
Response speed as a priority
Hotels that convert event enquiries at higher rates tend to treat response time as a commercial metric rather than an operational detail.
That means knowing what the current average response time is, and having a clear ownership model, so every enquiry has someone responsible for it within minutes of arrival. Tools like iVvyAI can handle the early stages of enquiry handling automatically, cutting the time between an enquiry landing and a response going out.
For many hotel events teams, the bottleneck is not effort or motivation. The process between receiving an enquiry and sending a response has more steps in it than it needs. Identifying where those steps are and removing the ones that don’t add value to the planner is usually where the meaningful improvement comes from.
A planner who gets a clear, useful response within a few hours tends to come back. For hotels and hotel chains, repeat corporate clients are where the real long-term revenue sits.
Your practical starting point
Audit the last 20 enquiries your team received. Note when each one arrived and when the first substantive response went out. The average time between those two points is your current baseline.
For most hotel events teams, that number is higher than expected. And for a proportion of those enquiries, the booking had already moved on before the response arrived.
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