For WiT Startup Pitch 2019 winner IDEM Hospitality, the meeting with Groups360 last June was fortuitous. What started out as a partnership discussion very quickly escalated into one around acquisition when it became obvious that it was “a match made in heaven”.
IDEM Hospitality is now Groups360 and its office in Singapore will represent Groups360’s interests in Asia, thanks to an acquisition deal sealed during the onset of the pandemic earlier this year.
The IDEM attendee management solution is now integrated with GroupSync, Groups360’s proprietary cloud-based technology. IDEM’s addition brings housing and room-block management tools for both hoteliers and planners worldwide, effectively giving hoteliers the ability to up sell room types, shoulder nights and other services directly to guests. And for meeting planners, they can “better manage their room block, monitor pick-up and keep attendee information synchronised with the property”.
US-based Group360’s GroupSync™ platform is touted as “the first truly transparent, efficient and cost-effective online tool for meeting planners to source and book meetings and events across a wide selection of brands”. Last August, Groups360 itself made news when Accor, Hilton, IHG (InterContinental Hotels Group) and Marriott International invested a combined $50 million in the organisation.
“We have always had plans to expand, and the US is 50% of the global meetings market, so we were always going to get there at some stage. But we saw this as an opportunity to have an express entry into the US market. It just ticked every box,” said Howden, co-founder and joint CEO of IDEM Hospitality and now senior vice president and general manager of attendee experience.
Tracing the story back to where IDEM began, Steven Hopkinson, IDEM Hospitality’s co-founder and CEO and now senior vice president of sales for EMEA and APAC for Groups360, said after winning WiT Startup Pitch in 2019, it headed to Fort Lauderdale to participate in Phocuswright’s Innovation Platform, as part of its win. Wanting to continue its initial discussions for a potential partnership deal with Groups360, they hopped over to Nashville where the latter is based.
“That’s when the conversations changed. They were approaching a fork in their road where they had to think about housing as part of their plans, so they had to consider an acquisition, a partnership or about building one themselves. With us, they thought an acquisition made the most sense,” said Hopkinson.
Although it was “far too early” for IDEM to have been themselves thinking about being acquired, when that opportunity was thrust upon them, it made sense.
“We liked their story, we liked the guys, and we relished the opportunity to work with not just the four major brands but with the tens of thousands of hotels they had on their platform,” added Hopkinson.
The pandemic never put the deal in jeopardy, but merely put a momentary pause while everyone “stopped to think what was going on”. Hopkinson said, however, they were all thinking long term.
“When people come back, automation will be key,” said Howden.
“The shifts in the industry caused by the pandemic have offered us a unique opportunity. In the new ecosystem and with fewer staff members, hotels and suppliers will need to engage their customers in a different way. Groups360 supplier solutions allow hotels to engage customers in a more digital environment by giving planners the option to send highly qualified RFPs to various properties or to book hotel rooms and meeting space through e-commerce,” added Howden.
“All the hotels want to automate as much as possible. The situation now has definitely fast tracked technological developments. Technology solutions that may have taken a year or two to develop is now taking three to six months to start to get implemented, because people are using the opportunity to take technology onboard,” said Hopkinson.
With deal in hand, the team is optimistic about what’s ahead.
“We tend to believe the present is also the future – so whatever is happening today, we think this is our future forever. But it never is. Maybe 10 percent of things will change but 90 percent goes back to normal. People will still want to meet – whether in groups of 20, or 20,000,” offered Howden.
When asked what they thought might change permanently in the meetings and events space as a result of this pandemic, Hopkinson suggested that perhaps temperature taking will become a permanent necessity, but technology will improve so that the process of taking temperatures will become even less invasive and sophisticated, and the cost will come down.
It is also likely that meetings may become smaller and involve more short rather than long haul travel. A company, said Howden, might choose to do six to seven satellite events, rather than hold one large meeting in a single location.
“If that is so, hotels will need even better sourcing technology because instead of one big hotel, you might need 10 smaller hotels and meeting rooms,” said Hopkinson.
Has its interface already had to change to accommodate some changes envisioned for the meetings space?
“We’ve already built a social distancing element into the software which helps to calculate all your different space requirements, and we can certainly accommodate needs around new regulations, said Howden.
