In late January, event-management firm Aventri signed an agreement with VenueBook to make more than 1,500 non-hotel venues available to Aventri users for direct booking. At present, the venues are located in the New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Denver, and Washington D.C. metro areas, but an expansion to several more markets is slated to happen later this year, which will bring the total number of available venues above 2,000.
The range of participating venues includes theaters; museums; renovated mansions; restaurants, bars, and lounges; breweries; sports and entertainment venues; team-building activity spaces; vineyards and wineries; wellness centers; and at least one World War II-era hangar.
VenueBook’s tool provides real-time access to available space at these types of venues plus special-request functionality, transparent pricing, and a proprietary booking engine. While there are other direct-booking tools for nontraditional venues in the marketplace—including SpaceBase, eventUp, Breather, and gaest, which was purchased last year by AirBnB—this new partnership advances Aventri’s goal of providing management of sourcing, negotiating, and contracting for all meeting elements within a single platform.
The VenueBook tool allows planners to research nontraditional venues; find availability; get quotes quickly from venues; negotiate terms; electronically sign contracts and make payment; manage stakeholder communication; get duty-of-care visibility; track real-time performance to mitigate risk and increase savings; and create reports with spending visibility in line with all other elements of a meeting.
The integrated platform will be available as part of Aventri Strategic Venue Sourcing. Planners will access VenueBook’s nontraditional event spaces and booking engine directly through the Aventri dashboard.
