When Review Events launched at the end of last month, the Web site that enables meeting and event planners to rate, rank and review industry suppliers joined a growing segment of sites that seek to replicate the success of TripAdvisor for the meetings industry.
In the past few years, such social review sites as I-Meet, MeetingUniverse and Meetings Intelligence Exchange have enabled meeting planners to rate and rank hotels, and in some cases other suppliers, and they all aim to offer reviews by and for meeting planners.
"The success of TripAdvisor indicates that social review sites can be a major player in the industry," said Corbin Ball, president of meetings consultancy Corbin Ball Associates. "The question is: Which one? Each of them is grappling with developing a business plan that works, and I think that probably some of them will go by the wayside. You need critical mass, and that's what TripAdvisor does well."
Site executives said the concept has yet to reach what they would define as critical mass, requiring much more usage. "They need to come up with a strategy to get lots of hotels reviewed, so that when people go to the sites they can compare property to property," Ball said. "To have one hotel in a location defeats the purpose, but it's a big challenge to grow beyond that."
Launched on June 29,Review Events is the latest to join the fold. "We're trying to achieve what the likes of TripAdvisor do for consumer travel but for the business events world," said brand manager James Thornton.
Thornton said many of the U.K. site's 500 registered users have come from the European corporate and agency event planner market, but Review Events also is seeking input from U.S.-based planners. Review Events' database includes 12,000 venues, as well as other meeting suppliers and a requests-for-proposals service.
Former StarCite CEO John Pino in November launched IMeet as an "industry-specific social network" targeted at the meetings industry. In addition to enabling users to load photos, post videos, write blogs and participate in forums, I-Meet hosts planner feedback on hotels, venues, ground transportation providers and airlines. I-Meet asks planners to answer 13 questions—varying by supplier segment—to rate vendors on a scale of one to five, and gives them the opportunity to write comments.
"All of us who are in this space now are in the early stages of building content," Pino said. "We've taken the approach that in order for planners to be effective, it has to be a quick rating survey. On our site, we call them two-minute surveys. If they have to spend much more time, they won't do many."
Pino this month estimated the site has about 9,800 registered users, about 59 percent of whom are planners. Site users have rated between 600 and 700 properties and service providers.
Since launching in December 2007, Meetings Intelligence Exchange has accumulated reviews for about 1,800 properties from 780 registered members—all vetted as meeting planners, said Tim Ryan, the site's founder.
The site asks planners to answer dozens of questions across "15 different criteria that meeting planners say are important to evaluating a meeting site." Planners rate properties on a five-point expectation scale—from "did not meet" to "greatly exceeded."
"It's going to take three to five minutes to get through our form and write a brief review at the end," Ryan said.
Meetings Collaborative's review criteria include a couple of quick questions on planner satisfaction and likelihood of recommending the property to another planner. Properties are rated on a five-star scale and meeting planners can post comments.
"Some of our competitors have very extensive questionnaires," said John Iwaniec, Meetings Collaborative's chief information officer. "People were concerned about the likelihood of planners taking the time to do a listing if it was too elaborate."
Iwaniec said the site has about 3,000 meeting planners registered and a total of 1,200 reviews across a database of 4,000 hotels.
MeetingUniverse is more methodologically rigorous than its counterparts. The site examines hotels on more than 100 group-specific criteria, allows only vetted meeting planners to review properties and does not consider a hotel to have a "full rating" until at least 10 complete reviews are posted and the property's management has completed a survey. "We're really the only site that distinguishes what we would call a review, which is a one-person, one-viewpoint type thing, and what we'd call a full rating," said president and founder of MeetingUniverse Russell Ridge.
However, Ridge conceded that such a level of rigor comes at the expense of volume. Only 12 properties have the full rating, he noted, though more than 110 properties have a review. Critical mass would not come until at least three or four hotel choices were fully rated in at least 30 major markets, he said.
"The only way to get critical mass is to get the hotels involved," Ridge said, noting that MeetingUniverse works with hotels on market research, after which the planner responses could be posted with the site, depending on the client's wishes.
Though its primary function is a request-for-proposals generator, EliteMeetings.com also enables meeting planners to post reviews on about 850 luxury and upper upscale properties in North America.
An advisory board with executives and meeting planners from Enterprise Rent-A-Car, Coca-Cola, Merrill Lynch, Hess, Charles Schwab and Nike, among others, gathers twice a year to certify that properties meet planner-specific criteria to be included in the "Elite Certified" database. The site also includes user-generated ratings, based on a 10-point scale, and a comment section for users to post reviews.
Travis Hodge, director of strategic partnerships for Elite Meetings International, said the site this year averages 17,000 unique monthly visitors, compared with an average of 4,500 unique monthly visitors in 2008.
In addition to diverging on functionality and methodology for rating suppliers, the sites also have diverged in their business models, selling everything from premium market research for suppliers, lead generation services to advertisers and enhanced listings for hotels and other suppliers listed on the sites.
Hosted buyer programs
that offer career-enriching accredited education with industry experts and pre-scheduled one-on-one appointments with destination suppliers
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