Venue sourcing starts earlier than many suppliers realize.
Planners form opinions before an RFP is sent and narrow options quickly once it is. Early signals often determine whether a venue is worth further effort.
The 2026 Cvent Global Planner Sourcing Report surveyed over 1,650 event professionals across six regions to understand what's shifting beneath the surface of sourcing. The story that emerges isn't one of seismic change. Timelines have shrunk, while expectations have multiplied.
Top Trends from the 2026 Planner Sourcing Report
1. Engagement Has Become the Real KPI
For the better part of a decade, planners optimized for cost. Venues competed on rate and won on price. That era is ending.
Sixty-three percent of planners now cite attendee engagement as their primary success metric. It doesn't mean budget doesn't matter (it absolutely does), and more than a quarter of planners worry constantly about staying within it. But when a planner has to choose between a cheaper venue and one that facilitates real connection, something has changed.
The numbers back this up. Seventy percent of planners still expect meeting volume to grow, yet nearly a third anticipate flat or declining attendance. They're doing fewer events. So each one needs to land.
Consider what that's doing to venue sourcing. Almost half of planners (48%) now actively source non-hotel spaces, such as restaurants and cultural venues. Flexibility of space ranks first (41%), followed by attendee experience (35%) and cost (34%).
North American planners feel the pressure acutely. More than a third say event volume will stay flat or decline. But even with that pessimism, their commitment to engagement hasn't budged. Attendee engagement still remains their top success metric for North American planners (32%), and so for planners in LATAM and Europe. Meanwhile, planners in Asia, Australia, and the MEA region anticipate event volumes to increase in 2026.
2. The Squeeze Between Cost and Experience Is Getting Real
Here's the tension nobody wants to admit: 72% of planners expect costs to rise up to 20% from 2025 and 69% expect budgets to rise by roughly the same amount. On the surface, that tracks. Everything rises together, problem solved. Except it's not working that way.
More planners are worried about staying within budget (35%) than they are about the cost of events themselves (30%). It's not about price sensitivity so much as about control. Planners want predictability. They want to know, early, what things will cost. They want to know the surprises won't keep coming.
Interestingly, only 24% of planners still cite proving ROI as a success metric, down from 28% last year. That's a telling shift. When engagement is the goal, ROI becomes harder to measure in traditional ways. It's qualitative. Harder to defend. And yet planners are still allocating budget to venues that can deliver it.
In Latin America, cost concerns cut deeper. Thirty-six percent cite cost as their top concern. In MEA, 43% name the budget as their biggest worry, highest of any region. That regional variation suggests either tighter margins there or less flexibility to absorb cost surprises.
What does this mean for hotels?
Transparency is critical. When you respond to an RFP, be explicit about what planners get for their money. Don't just list rates. Explain the experience, the logistics you'll handle, and the attendee touchpoints you'll facilitate. Show the value early so planners can justify the spend internally before surprises emerge.
3. Sourcing Has Become a Speed Game
Three-quarters of planners now use AI in their sourcing process. Ninety-six percent use online tools to build RFPs to save time and streamline contracting. They're moving fast and want hotels to do the same.
Regionally, the comfort level with tech varies. In Europe, only 13% say technology hinders their search. In North America, 29% say the same. Australia's planners are all in: 96% actively use technology to source. MEA planners are the most positive overall: just 5% say tech hinders them, 87% say it helps. That suggests either better platform integration there or different expectations entirely.
Regardless, planners expect responses within four business days for small or mid-sized events. Add to it, they want the RFP response to be specific, personalized, and clear. Twenty-two percent of planners say proposals lack transparency. Twenty-one percent say venues don't answer custom questions well. Those two friction points alone suggest a real gap.
When a planner asks about your breakout space configuration, they’re asking a specific question. If your responses are generic, or worse, templated, planners spot those immediately and deprioritize. They can tell when you send the same doc to 20 other hotels.
4. Planners Have a Defined RFP Processes
Here's something worth sitting with: 97% of planners estimate they realize cost and time savings by following a defined sourcing process. Forty-two percent report 10-30% cost savings, while forty percent see 10-30% time savings.
That’s expected because standardization reduces back-and-forth. It surfaces comparable data across venues and savings opportunities while speeding up internal approvals.
From a planner's perspective, this is obvious. From a hotel's perspective, it often means they need to adapt their processes to fit the planner's sourcing structure. Planners are standardizing. Hotels that haven't adapted their RFP response infrastructure will find themselves competing on fewer occasions or in larger pools where differentiation matters less.
Adoption rates of a defined RFP process hover around 98% in Asia and MEA while it’s 95% in Australia. The floor is so high that regional differences barely matter. The shift is universal. Which means the competitive advantage goes to venues that can integrate smoothly into a planner's defined process, not ones that force planners to adapt to them.
5. Speed Plus Personalization Is Winning
When planners have access to comparable data across 10 venues simultaneously, decision-making changes. They're comparing proposals side by side and analyzing responses with AI.
This puts real pressure on venues. Generic responses don't cut it anymore. Planners spot them instantly. More importantly, they deprioritize them. Consider what influences a planner to submit an RFP in the first place.
During the sourcing process, planners said that the availability of meeting room specifications (50%), images and video (48%), and floor plans/ diagrams (46%) had the most influence on their decision to submit an RFP to a venue.
Twenty-five percent of planners say researching specs and capabilities is the most challenging stage of sourcing. Twenty-four percent say getting responses is. Solve one of those problems well, and you've removed significant friction.
Response times matter, but they're not the only factor. Transparency is equally important and so does specificity. The ability to show that you understood a planner's event request and tailored your response accordingly, that matters most.
6. Planners Are Relying More on Vendors
Ninety-five percent of planners use on-site event support vendors. That's not an enhancement. That's table stakes. When it comes to achieving their primary goal of attendee engagement, 57% often or always work with vendors who specialize in it.
Here's the surprise: more planners work with event tech vendors (57%) than with AV production (52%). Event tech has moved from nice-to-have to essential. Why? Because venues are understaffed, and planners are compensating by bringing in partners who can fill gaps.
In MEA, 70% of planners regularly use event tech vendors while in Australia and North America it is 62% and 49%, respectively. Those differences suggest regional staffing dynamics are quite different. But they all share one thing: planners have stopped expecting a single venue to be everything.
Venues should acknowledge their staffing reality instead of pretending it doesn't exist. Forty-two percent of planners say staffing shortages at venues manifest in inexperienced staff. So, position yourself as a coordinator of expertise rather than the sole provider of everything. Know the vendors your planners will need and maintain strong relationships.
What Venues Can Do To Increase Group Hotel Booking
Planners still believe in meetings and want to gather people. But they're operating within different constraints, such as tighter timelines, higher engagement expectations, smaller internal teams, and more analytical sourcing processes. For venues, that creates real opportunity by doing specific things better, such as:
Make information accessible before planners ask, including detailed specs, images, floor plans, and realistic descriptions of constraints and capabilities. When a planner can research your space in 10 minutes instead of 30, you've removed friction.
Respond within four business days and answer the specific questions asked, not generic versions of them.
State what you can and can't do clearly, since planners respect venues that level-set early. Surprises can create mistrust and cost relationships.
Treat vendor coordination as a core service. Know who handles event tech, entertainment, and DMC services. Integrate them. Planners will pay for that coordination because it reduces their workload.
Planners prioritize engagement over cost. Show them you understand how to facilitate it. That might mean outlining space flow, suggesting session formats, or connecting them with the right entertainment partner.
The venues winning new business aren't necessarily the biggest or cheapest. They're the ones that have recognized this shift toward speed, specificity, and partnership. They've adapted their RFP infrastructure and trained their teams. They've thought through how planners work.
To see these findings in detail, including regional breakdowns and the full picture of sourcing behavior across all six regions, download the 2026 Planner Sourcing Report.
Mansi Soni
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