Accelerace invests in Crowdbook, a plug-and-play booking solution for the event and conference industry
Accelerace invests in Crowdbook, a booking solution for the event and conference industry to automate a heavily under-digitalized booking process. Crowdbook is a graduate of the fourth cohort of the Beyond Beta accelerator program.
Automates an under-digitalized booking process
When it comes to digitalization, the event and conference industry has fallen behind. Due to the lack of elegant integrations between front-end and back-end systems, the booking of corporate events, conferences and meetings is done by requesting a quote instead of completing a direct booking. With 7+ years in the industry, Co-founder and CEO Mads Plet-Hansen experienced the inefficiency first-hand:
“I’ve been working in the industry since 2015, and just noticed how much time the coordinators in the booking used on handling proposals. In short, it’s about 30-60 minutes per proposal, and about a third of those convert to a customer, so 1,5-3 hours per booking.”
Mads Plet-Hansen, Co-founder and CEO at Crowdbook
The industry is, however, moving towards cloud-based systems that unlock new types of products on the market. Crowdbook takes advantage of this new technology infrastructure. By offering event and conference centers a plug-and-play booking front-end, Crowdbook creates a win-win where both sides save time and frustration. The booker can immediately see the availability and complete the booking in 5 minutes, and the event and conference centers no longer need to take care of booking proposals manually:
“Standard practice today is that you as a booker fill out a boring 10-field contact form, and all in all before there’s a proposal, it’s been anywhere from 2-7 days. With us you’re done in 5 minutes. From the conference centers perspective, they save all the time they usually used on making proposals.”
Mads Plet-Hansen, Co-founder and CEO at Crowdbook
Mads founded Crowdbook in 2021 together with Frederik Korshøj and Casper Bottelet. Together they make a complete team with industry-specific experience and expertise in IT project management, software development, and system architecture.
Plenty of booking-related problems to solve
In the future, Crowdbook wants to automate the entire booking process. Because booking the venue is only one part — there are tons of supportive processes that eat up time, including collecting participant lists and keeping track of allergies. Crowdbook’s vision is to decrease the time spent on this to zero.
In addition to saving time, Crowdbook and its digital booking solution allow event and conference centers to capitalize on upsell opportunities. It is currently possible to offer add-ons when finalizing one’s booking, and the next step is automating the sales process through, for example, behavioral emails.
The vision is clear — to become the preferred way of booking anything venue-related.