MCLEAN, VA -- Cvent operates the number one marketplace for group meetings business in the world and has driven $3.4 billion in meetings spend through the Cvent Supplier Network through the first half of 2012 – a 50% increase over last year. Nearly one-fourth of this spend came from international bookings outside of North America. Planners at 8,100 organizations have sourced 47,000 meetings through the first half of the year – a 42% increase in meetings volume over the same period last year.

"Thanks to the tens of thousands of planners and hotels that are part of the Cvent Supplier Network, every participant can increasingly benefit from the most dynamic meetings ecosystem in the industry," said Bharet Malhotra, Vice President of Sales for the Cvent Supplier Network . "Buyers can create specific requests and target the right locations quickly and competitively. Suppliers can efficiently evaluate leads and win more business. By bringing all market participants together, Cvent is continuing to improve the sourcing process and deliver value for everyone involved."

The Cvent Supplier Network creates value for planners and suppliers. It includes more than 200,000 hotels and special event venues worldwide, providing one-stop shopping for meetings buyers. Additionally, the Company extends suppliers' reach to new customers among the Cvent Supplier Network's more than 160,000 planners, helping hotels maximize their existing sales and marketing resources.

Complementing the Supplier Network, Cvent's recently re-launched Destination Guide now covers more than 1,000 destinations for meeting planners, and helps suppliers build awareness for planners looking in their markets. With more than 20,000 searchable pages of content on meetings destinations and over 1,000 featured hotels and CVBs, it is the most comprehensive meetings guide on the market for planners, used by over 100,000 planners every month.

"Keeping the Supplier Network in balance is extremely important to create value for all participants," added Malhotra. "This means listening to the marketplace and responding quickly to its feedback. For example, we've invested heavily in technology revisions and trained tens of thousands of hotel employees with a goal of making the RFP response process a very manageable process of responding in just minutes. This will allow hotels to become even more efficient and effective as they compete for meetings business."

Cvent has developed a platform hotels can use to more easily manage RFPs that planners send through its system. The technology helps hotels develop response templates to provide a faster answer to planners, allowing hotels to pre-populate RFPs with basic information and clone responses to common requests. The technology is also proactively guides planners, helping them create better RFPs by, for example, sending a warning prompt when a venue cannot satisfy a request such as number of sleeping rooms.