We had a chance to chat with a customer of ours from lovely Budapest, Hungary. It was an absolute thrill to discuss with Gergely Haris, who is an experienced Meetings & Events professional. Thank you, Gergely, appreciate you joining us...
We are an event center and restaurant complex without accommodation. All this is in a heritage building which is a very unique service offering in the Budapest city center. We really don’t have any direct competitors that would have large event facilities, historical surroundings, and restaurant services. We’re hosting business events and weddings on the weekend for up to 200 people. So we consider ourselves a multifunctional event service provider.
Budapest increased its MICE capacity significantly. Many 5-star hotels opened with large meeting facilities, the airport built a new terminal, and the local exhibition center expanded its capacity. So it's safe to say before the pandemic, tourism was booming from the supply and demand side. We opened in April 2018, so I have not yet seen a normal winter season because of Covid. Curious to see what is the normal “low” season for us.
I'd been to an IDeaS training in Vienna, and I met Joonas there as he was doing one of the workshops that MeetingPackage does with their partners like IDeaS. I was immediately interested in the product as I have been working as an F&B revenue & distribution manager for an international hotel chain before.
I understood what this product does, what the goal is, and how it removes the friction from the booking process. There are so many extra services and personalization aspects when booking an event or meeting compared to booking an accommodation that I thought, “wow, now we're onto something here”.
The biggest asset of MeetingPackage is automation. When there are multiple interchangeable rooms because of their size and setup, it's a very handy tool as it makes the RFP process faster and gives an excellent opportunity to manage the revenue. In our case, we need a human touch in between because our meeting rooms are very different, and service offering is so tailored that it does not make sense to sell them solely online. But still, MeetingPackage gives the benefits of automation as we don't need to remember deadlines or provisional hold dates as the system will remind the customer and us of any important dates until the actual event.