NOVEMBER 2007 - VENUEDIRECTORY.COM BUYS CLICK4VENUES.COM
venuedirectory.com announced today the successful purchase of its closest rival, click4venues.com, which is also a publisher of electronic conference venue data.
Although only established just over 2 years ago, click4venues.com has quickly become a firm favourite with both corporate and agency clients, offering an alternative to venuedirectory.com which has been the dominant force in the market since 1993.
'click4venues.com is a great resource for our business that is really easy to use. It gives us access to all the UK venues whilst improving the speed and efficiency of our business.'
Gavin Tett - The Venue Team
venuedirectory.com has been established for over 15 years, commencing on floppy disks, then CD and 10 years ago on the web, and is widely regarded as the custodian of the most comprehensive conference data. Founder Richard Parkin said, “We felt that click4venues.com had come to the market with a fresh approach and based their service on web functionality -therefore this complements venuedirectory.com perfectly.” Accessing data quickly and accurately is very important to the busy conference organiser and “click4venues.com has developed some great search refinements including executive searches, a wedding search and a very clever London search based on the Underground Map,” commented Richard.
venuedirectory.com has long been regarded as the originator of electronic conference data and 2007 has seen a dramatic enhancement in the business following significant investment from Simon Lester and Michael Begley, who previously operated The Venue Resource Group prior to its sale in 2005. VRG, as it was known, was one of the key players in the business travel and conference market and had worked with venuedirectory.com in the past on various projects.
Simon Lester, now Chairman of venuedirectory.com, explained the developments that are taking place. “At VRG we developed a fully integrated piece of software called GRATIS that ran our business and provided an efficient accommodation and conference reservation tool for our 50 agents. We worked with our clients, Worldspan and the major hotel groups to develop a reservation system that was of equal benefit to both our clients as well as the venues that we booked on their behalf. The challenge was always maintaining the venue data. With over 6,000 potential venues in the UK it was always a mammoth task to maintain that information. As a result of the sale of VRG back in 2005 Michael and I retained the software which we have now integrated with venuedirectory.com and are currently installing GRATIS with selected agents.”
Michael is keen to emphasise the opportunities for venues. “Our target market for GRATIS is conference agencies employing 5 – 25 people who are looking for a sophisticated piece of software to run their business that normally only large agencies can afford. The key for the venue is that they can go online to venuedirectory.com, update their information, add new images, and moments later the information will appear on the proposals of agents throughout the UK. This gives venues direct access to conference agents, simply through the venuedirectory.com web site."
