As M&E professionals and hoteliers are tasked with reducing costs and boosting profits, the pressure to do more with less continues to mount. Teams are becoming leaner and operating budgets are shrinking, making the need for smarter, more efficient solutions even more urgent.
One major challenge is the continued reliance on outdated, ad hoc back-of-house processes that not only add administrative burden but also obscure key data, making it harder to make informed decisions. Despite the industry’s ongoing focus on technology transformation, automation, and optimization, there’s a glaring gap in discussions around streamlining these crucial backend processes.
A recent Event Technology Insights Report from Event Industry News highlights this oversight. When asked what they wanted to learn more about, “project management/planning” and “data analytics/insights” ranked near the bottom ten technology categories. Even more telling, the report showed that “Sales/Finance/CRM” declined in interest from 2022 to 2023. Yet, this is precisely where a transformative opportunity lies – investments in technology and process optimization for back-end workflows could drive the kind of change that industry professionals are looking for.
Commissions. Compliance. Operational efficiency. Why aren’t these sexier topics?
To explore how the M&E and hospitality industries can better support professionals in this impactful but often overlooked area of the business, we spoke with stakeholders from both sectors. The insights we uncovered were quite revealing.
The Pressure Is on to Reduce Costs
Despite pandemic restrictions on travel and tourism largely being a thing of the past, teams in the hospitality sector find themselves confronting shrinking budgets. “Coming out of Covid, teams will not likely be the same size that they were before,” says Amy Forss, VP of Delphi Sales at Amadeus, a tech company in the travel and hospitality industry. “It’s [still] about doing more or the same with less of a headcount.”
Meanwhile, event professionals are struggling with rising costs that impact both their and their clients’ budgets. “Customers don’t understand why everything costs so much,” says Gail Orfanos, owner of Go Meetings + Events. According to Orfanos, rising costs across the board are compounded by unpredictable price changes.
“Transparency in pricing is crucial, and I encourage all partners and suppliers to be upfront about costs from the beginning, » says Orfanos. « While agencies sometimes have to absorb unexpected expenses, such as the additional time needed to source new vendors or renegotiate contracts, my priority is always to shield my clients from these hidden costs.”
While this can happen from event to event, changes in commission rates and the way commissions are paid can also throw event professionals for a loop. These changes have, in the past, been made with little notice, consideration or transparency. The accommodations afforded during the pandemic have since largely dissolved as business have rebounded. Event planners have also begun incorporating new clauses into their contracts in an effort to retain some protections against things like changing room rates and – amazingly – the hotel itself undercutting the group rates they offered by booking cheaper rooms directly.
“There’s definitely an opportunity for event and hospitality professionals to work more collaboratively,” says Miguel Neves, Editor-in-Chief of Skift Meetings, adding that commissions aren’t spoken about very candidly. “Different hotels have different commission policies, which are complicated by a variety of nuances and tricky details, like points.” According to Neves, event agencies are often caught in an awkward Catch 22: hotel partners believe event agencies should be happy with increased rates because that means higher commissions. However, this exacerbates unfavorable attrition policies in a time when client budgets aren’t increasing to match those rates, putting more strain on their negotiating capacity. “It’s like being squeezed on both sides,” says Neves.
The Solution: More Data, More Visibility
“Some of the most significant challenges in today’s event landscape are structural [issues] like venue exclusives, opaque pricing, and practices that verge on monopolistic,” says Jay Weintraub, CEO and founder of Connectiv Holdings (Event Technology Insight Report, Event Industry News). For Weintraub, “big data” is the key to creating “transparency that is currently lacking in the industry”, giving event organizers more control and autonomy.
“Event and hospitality professionals often work in isolation in their own worlds,” says Forss. She believes there should be an integrated process in which everyone is working from a single source of truth, as opposed to everyone managing their own records and needing to come to a consensus about next steps after the fact.
Orfanos echoes this sentiment: “having more visibility over your partner costs, which partners offer the best rates, and how much business you conduct with a given partner would significantly improve negotiations.” This, in turn, would make it easier to serve clients within their budgets and lead to a better experience for all.
Education Needs to Be Deeper, More Actionable
Both Forss and Orfanos have observed that event and hospitality professionals have begun assessing their operational efficiencies in order to maximize their profit margin. However, actionable education about what that means in practical terms is lacking in both industries.
“It’s at the forefront of everyone’s mind, but the question is how to do it,” says Forss. “No one has got it mastered – even the big brands. Everyone is scrambling to figure out how to do it best.”
Part of the problem is that there’s a stigma around admitting knowledge gaps, says Orfanos. “We’re not a sharing community.”
Neves points out that part of the motivation to innovate comes from the fact that mastery of those processes is central to the agency value proposition. “The biggest investment [for event agencies] is in the people, and their specific way of doing things is kind of the secret sauce for each agency.” Unfortunately, this tends to stifle an open exchange around best practices.
Orfanos believes there should be more education around practical topics like strategic meetings management, budget management, and better invoicing processes. She notes that much of the current education often focuses on buzzword-laden topics that come and go. “I believe the industry could do more to provide deeper, more practical resources and education.”
“There’s definitely a gap,” notes Neves. “AI is really flashy, and everybody sort of knows and understands ChatGPT, but where people really stand to gain is actually in internal processes – and a lot of agencies and big private trade show organizers are actually investing in [them].”
Solutions Need to Be Framed for the Right Audience
Another problem, notes Neves, is a question of audience fit. The agency stakeholders responsible for managing the team’s technology are often not the intended audience for educational events and resources, and communication between the different departments may be lacking. This creates the risk of a misfire when investing in tech solutions.
Aligning the needs of different stakeholders means framing the education and the value of back-of-house improvements in terms of the audience’s actual priorities and KPIs.
“More education about operational efficiencies could show meeting planners how to better use their existing budgets rather than asking for more money,” says Orfano, who emphasizes that experienced meeting planners are trained in securing the best rates, but that the process of doing so is itself an expense many clients haven’t budgeted for. “A tool that reveals critical information to support my cost analysis would be a huge benefit. The more benchmarking information I can use to determine the best price, the better situated I am for making smart decisions quickly.”
Automation can go a long way in minimizing the administrative cost of managing new partners or those with unpredictable pricing, and the information advantage of being able to easily visualize the rates and payout of different partners would be a huge boon to the process. For example, GroupPay by Onyx CenterSource can help to visualize commissions data across an agency’s business portfolio, which gives event planners more context for selecting partners based on favorable, predictable rates. It also supports agencies in setting more accurate expectations based on real costs from historical data, which reduces the risk of relationship-compromising budget impositions late in the game. This is of particular benefit to larger agencies or those handling larger and more varied client portfolios involving extensive hotel partner networks.
Automation can support hotel professionals as well. Giving event professionals an idea of a hotel partner’s prices from the start can help expedite the process for both sides and help to reduce the administrative burden of ensuring compliance in regions the event teams may not be familiar with.
Ultimately, it’s the tech companies that stand to reap the most rewards from creating a better understanding of how their solution can improve the day-to-day operations of event planning back-offices. While tech solutions are being developed, there’s a learning curve to contend with,” says Forss. Without educational support and standard operating procedures, the change management process falls through and “the tech just sits there being underutilized.” Tech companies are in the best position to manage that education while having the most to gain.
A Shift in Mindset: Prioritizing Innovation and the Long Game
As tech solutions became more routinely adopted across all industries, they were largely seen as one-and-done purchases. The model fostered relationships between the technology companies and their clients beginning and ending with the implementation of the technology. But if we are to benefit from proven success of cross-functional collaboration, the industry will need to prioritize awareness of how to achieve partnership between tech providers and customers.
“The audience is getting there,” says Forss. “Customers are evaluating technology companies in terms of partnerships rather than vendors.” Moving from a transactional to a more relationship-oriented approach to sourcing technology inherently involves more trust, but also more involvement when it comes to changing management support.
Maximizing your tech stack’s potential may also involve a shift in mindset, says Neves. Many event agencies “are living paycheque to paycheque” and lack the bandwidth to evaluate whether or not they’re doing things in the most efficient way possible, says Neves. “The volume of their work and the fallout of changes to their programs may dictate what kinds of investments they can make in their own internal processes.”
A consequence of this is the tendency to add solutions piecemeal to solve individual challenges as they arise rather than designing a system with the most efficiencies from the outset, says Neves. “Rather than being trapped by your processes and trying to plug solutions into them, the amount of solutions coming out and their potential to revolutionize the way business is being done makes this a unique moment for reassessing not just particular workflows but the core philosophy behind how the workflows are built.”
Recognizing the opportunity cost can be a powerful motivator, says Neves, but in contrast with front-of-house categories like registration or event engagement, back-of-house processes aren’t as easy for planners to just see in action and evaluate. “There’s definitely an opportunity there for the industry to educate them more proactively and teach them what to look out for.”
Conclusion
Efficiency and cost management are priorities for event and hospitality professionals, but back-of-house processes remain underprioritized in industry discourse and education. The lack of standardization, actionable training, and open dialogue about operational challenges creates barriers to optimizing workflows, while outdated processes continue to strain already stretched budgets and teams.
However, automation, better visibility, and robust data solutions can alleviate administrative burdens, improve negotiations, and align client expectations with actual costs to protect relationships. At the same time, this technology, and the standardization it brings can help to overcome the lack of knowledge-sharing, especially within the event industry where proprietary knowledge is often seen as a unique selling proposition for event agencies.
The path forward requires collaboration between professionals, tech partners, and educational institutions to create meaningful, practical resources that address real-world challenges. By shifting mindsets to focus on the long-term value of streamlined operations and relationships with tech partners, the event and hospitality industries can not only improve their efficiencies today but lay the groundwork for sustainable success in the future.