LUXURY VENUE CLASSIFICATION AND DISCOVERY FOR EVENT PLANNERS

Abstract

The Cvent Supplier Network (CSN) is a widely used business-to-business venue sourcing platform that connects event planners with hotels and venues across hundreds of countries. Within this marketplace, luxury venues form a high-value segment and consistently generate a disproportionate share of request-for-proposal (RFP) activity relative to their share of total listings. Despite this, CSN offers no systematic method for identifying, classifying or surfacing these venues in a way that reflects how planners evaluate luxury or how luxury hotels seek to position themselves. This thesis documents a six-month industry research project conducted within the Product Design team at Cvent, focused on understanding the gap between how planners experience luxury venue discovery on CSN and what the experience could offer them. The research was carried out in two phases. The first phase, Discovery, combined a platform audit of CSN's existing flows, qualitative interviews with six event planners and ten hoteliers, a competitive analysis of five alternative venue sourcing platforms and a quantitative analysis of platform data drawn from CSN's internal Client Loyalty Survey (CLS) records and RFP transaction logs. The second phase, Solution Exploration, synthesised research findings into a refined problem statement, a user persona and a customer journey map, and then proposed a set of design solutions that were subsequently presented to and validated by the product management and design leadership team at Cvent. The key finding of the research is that a significant number of venues that genuinely qualify as luxury by objective criteria are not tagged as luxury on the platform, yet these venues receive approximately six times more RFPs than venues that are tagged as luxury but do not meet the same criteria. This mismatch between the platform's classification system and actual planner behaviour points to a structural problem in how luxury is defined and surfaced on CSN. The proposed solution introduces a luxury classification framework based on a tiered scoring model that draws on external industry accreditations, platform behavioural data and venue profile attributes. Building on this framework, the solution centres on a luxury toggle within the search experience, allowing planners to shift directly into a pre-filtered view of verified luxury and ultra-luxury venues. Supporting changes to the venue profile page and the hotelier listing template are also proposed. Evaluative research in the form of usability testing on the prototyped solution is planned as the next phase of this project. Findings from that research will be incorporated into this document once complete. A dedicated section has been reserved for this purpose in Chapter 5.