NATIONAL REPORT—A relatively new tool for bringing hospitality industry buyers and suppliers together—known as a matchmaking event—has grown in popularity recently. And with the national economy still mired in a deep recession, such events may continue to gain favor as buyers and suppliers now seek new ways to negotiate favorable deals and forge relationships.
However, matchmaking events’ newfound popularity hardly spells the end of the line for hospitality industry tradeshows, the traditional means for bringing buyers and suppliers together. Rather, industry experts told HOTEL BUSINESS® last month there’s room in the marketplace for both models with matchmaking sessions complementing the important function that tradeshows provide.
Matchmaking events pair buyers and suppliers in brief one-on-one sessions where buyers get to learn more about the suppliers’ products and services. Discussions go on across a simple tabletop with the buyer and vendor seated across from each other. Appointments are pre-arranged and typically last 20 minutes. In one variation, it’s the suppliers who sit and the buyers circulate around the room, going from one appointment to another. In an alternate approach, it’s the buyers who get to sit and the suppliers who move from table to table at the prearranged times.
“In our model, the suppliers are stationery and the buyers are the ones who rotate. Suppliers often have brochures or product samples, so to ask them to move around would be a hardship,” explained Rich Viola, president and CEO of Smithtown, NY-based Hotel Interactive and its matchmaking event business called Buyer Interactive Trade Alliance & Conference (BITEC).
The buyers selected by BITEC to participate in the sessions cover a wide range of job titles. “Overall, it’s a blend of people that represent all types of lodging companies, whether it’s the corporate brands themselves, franchise companies, management companies or ownership groups,” Viola noted. “We want to be representative of the entire industry and not restrict ourselves to a specific category of buyer.”
BITEC currently conducts six matchmaking events a year, signing up 200 to 250 participants per event. “The blend is somewhere in the 50% buyers, 50% suppliers range,” Viola said.
BITAC was recently recognized as an overwhelming choice by attendees for the quality of its events during a survey commissioned by Belden Associates. The survey focused on the “matchmaking formatted events because of the heightened focus on this category from the media.”
The 20-minute one-on-one discussion allows for a meaningful exchange of information and relationship building, noted Michael Schneider, president of Ossining, NY-based Boutique Media Group, which produces a series of matchmaking events called Hospitality Match. “It’s about quality, not quantity interaction. Both buyers and suppliers get a better feel for the person they’re meeting with,” Schneider said.
Suppliers especially want concrete results. “They want to get straight to the decision-maker and they’re ready to deal,” Schneider continued, noting that all buyers in attendance are thoroughly prescreened.
Schneider added that Hospitality Match events typically have 40 buyers and slightly fewer suppliers, making the events relatively small vis-à-vis BITEC, for example. “We wish we were bigger, but if you get too big, it defeats the purpose of intimate networking,” he said.
As a business model, matchmaking events differ in fundamental ways from traditional hospitality trade events.
This was confirmed by Phil Robinson, senior vp of White Plains, NY-based George Little Management, which produces the annual International Hotel/Motel & Restaurant Show in New York. “It’s been proven that they work for certain suppliers. That said, they’re very different than the trade show model, which is modeled on putting a significant number of resources in front of a particular buyer in a large forum,” Robinson explained.
“There should be room for both in the marketplace. They’re really different. Basically, matchmaking events facilitate the need to set up meetings, while trade shows facilitate a need to provide a community for an industry. They provide industry content, they’re open to the industry, everybody can play,” explained Michelle Finn, vp of Nielsen Business Media’s Hospitality Design Group in based in Chicago. The group produces the annual Hospitality Design Expo and Hospitality Design Boutique trade shows in Las Vegas and Miami, respectively.
“Trade shows provide a venue where manufacturers can really present what’s new on a large scale. Especially at a design show, there’s a visual impact you can only get from seeing new products, new trends. Like fashion, hospitality design is a very tactile industry,” Finn said.
Both Viola and Schneider noted that given the depth of the current recession buyers and supplies benefit from as many opportunities as possible to relationship build and to negotiate. “Every time you have the opportunity to get in front of your customers or potential customers in any environment is a very good thing,” Viola said. “There are different kinds of models as we go forward.”