Tuesday, December 5, 2017
Expedia, Inc announced that its automated MICE online booking engine has started rolling out to select the strategic hotel partners in the United States of America.
There is the part of Expedia Powered Technology, the white-label technology solution is a ready-to-implement, back-end software that hotels can integrate into their own websites.
The technology can speed up and simplify a luxurious and historically time-consuming RFP process for small-to-medium-sized meetings and events, and enable hotels to answer RFPs approximately 20 times faster.
The MICE market is perfectly positioned and primed for technology-led disruption.
Expedia represents a $400 billion global industry accounting for $121 billion in direct travel expenditures, with four out of every 10 dollars spent on business travel in the U.S. attributable to the MICE market.
It’s also an industry that is led by small meetings, typically fewer than 25 participants, which is a segment ripe for automation and digitization.
Despite this, a significant portion of MICE business is done through an inefficient, manual and labor-intensive RFP process.
The MICE booking solution is a first-of-its-kind automated technology solution that can enable U.S. hotels to maximize the possibility for their meeting and event spaces, while managing and growing meetings and events revenue through process efficiency, and can increase MICE sales prospects.
By automating the MICE planning and booking process for smaller meetings, hotel sales managers can focus their time and effort on larger or more complex, and higher margin RFPs, and help to maximize revenue.
The Expedia MICE booking engine allows meeting and event planners to instantly search, price, configure and book meeting space online, including any AV, equipment and catering needs, as well as group lodging.
The hotels can influence the white label technology solution for one or hundreds of properties. Integrated revenue management tools can link up to a hotel’s property management system to enable hotels to adjust their meeting and group prices dynamically to help increase revenue.
This can be based on multiple dynamic factors tailored to the individual hotel’s requirements, including seasonality, day of the week, room type, and number of participants.
