As Live Events Return, Cvent Stays ‘Triple Threat’ Course | Business Travel News

Meetings technology giant Cvent on Thursday announced
second-quarter revenue above the top end of its projections, fueled by a return
of in-person short-term meetings. But company executives said the return of
live events and the memory-holing of the pandemic-era exclusively virtual
meetings program doesn’t change Cvent’s strategy of a three-way platform
offering of live, hybrid and virtual events.

Cvent calls that lineup its “triple
threat,” and CEO Reggie Aggarwal touted the strategy as a way for the
company to help manage an organization’s meeting no matter what format it
happened to be in But the second quarter’s return to in-person events has been
rough for some tech-centric event companies that specialize in virtual, with
several undergoing rounds of layoffs. Aggarwal, though, said in-person meetings
started out as Cvent’s bread and butter through most of its more than 20 years
of existence, and the hybrid and virtual aspects of its platform still will
fill a need. 

“Once you start going back in person, it really made
the triple threat real,” said Aggarwal in response to an analyst’s
question about the future of virtual. “Now people are like, ‘I need a
platform because I may do an in-person event that switches over to virtual all
of a sudden for whatever reason. … They need to be on one platform to make sure
they safeguard the attendee’s journey, not just the organization’s journey, but
for the attendee to make it seamlessly. And with ours, we can run all the
events on one platform.”

Aggarwal also pointed to the platform’s ability to help
measure return on investment and attendee attitudes throughout and after events
of any type.

Still, Aggarwal was clear that in-person events during the
second quarter took a big step toward recovery. Data from Cvent’s Supplier
Network, through which users can send meeting requests for proposals to hotels
and other vendors, “shows our RFP volume has been steadily increasing
since the beginning of the year,” he said. “And in a few weeks during
the quarter, we actually saw RFP volume approach their 2019 levels,”
adding that 2019 was a record year for the company in terms of volume.

Cvent’s second-quarter revenue exceeded its projections
“primarily driven by planners moving quickly to add in-person events as
the pandemic eases,” said Cvent CFO and SVP Billy Newman during the call.
“This resulted in an acceleration of our sales cycle for on-site solutions
and the time between contract signing and event execution.”

Cvent, like may travel suppliers in their second-quarter
earnings calls, discussed the possibility of an economic downturn, but Newman
said the company hasn’t seen much evidence that the prospect of one is changing
clients’ meeting plans, so far. 

“There’s some small signs of maybe some indecision in
some cases, but really nothing major,” Newman said. “And that’s why
we’re very confident in our growth projections.” He added that hoteliers,
too, are going ahead with plans for 2023. “Frankly, in discussions we’ve
had with them, it’s not really coming up,” he said.

Cvent Q2 Results

Cvent announced second-quarter revenue of $161 million, up
31.1 percent from the second quarter of 2021 and $6.8 million higher than the
high end of its guidance. Revenue from Cvent’s Event Cloud increased 31.6
percent year over year to $112.6 million, while Hospitality Clous revenue
increased 29.8 percent to $48.3 million.

Cvent’s second-quarter net loss increased to $31.5 million,
compared with a net loss of $21.8 million in second quarter of 2021.

The company named Penn State University, Baker Tilly, Aon,
Ingram Micro, The CMO Council, California Association for Bilingual Education
and The University of Melbourne as Event Cloud clients for the quarter.

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