While travel and tourism was one of the first industries to get into tech aggregation in the country, the same can’t be said about venues. Although there is no dearth of venues fitting all budgets and scales, both as part of hotels as well as standalones, discovering a right fit is usually a big challenge as tech aggregation is still a far cry in this segment. This is the space that Naveen Gupta and Vishal Puri, founder and co-founders respectively of Spalba, a B2B SaaS platform for venues, ventured to solve. Started in 2020, Spalba, after completing its product ideation and development, rolled out the tools early last year, which today has leading hotel groups like The Leela, the Oberoi Hotels, GCC Hotels & Club, among others as customers. “All the Leela properties and the bulk of the Oberoi hotels in India are today using our Spalba tools,” says Puri.
The company has been able to onboard over 3000 venues on the platform, Puri said that enabling all of them digitally takes time.
“Around 150 properties and 1000 venues are currently enabled with complete search, discovery, exploration, planning and booking on Spalba,” he added.
“We want to grow quickly now and enable more properties and venues to be digitally available,” he said, adding that the company is hopeful of growing the number of properties and venues at least five-fold by the end of this year.
Talking about the convenience and efficiency that comes with the technology, Puri said that the XR/VR technology they use enables complete visualisation, walk through, etc. at the click of a button. Even measurement of ceiling height, enclosures to the venues, and different permutations and combinations possible in terms of seating formats is possible with 3-D visualisation technology.
The sales team of the hotels or venues can showcase all these to potential clients quite easily taking away the need for physical visit or inspection of the venue at the initial stages, he said.
“We also have a booking module which allows entire venue management,” Puri said, adding that apart from hotels, clubs, cafes and museums were also customers of Spalba.
“Some of our clients have reported over 35 percent jump in international enquiries after using our tools,” he said.
Talking specifically of properties with multiple venues like GCC Hotel and Club Mumbai, Puri said that the Spalba tools were helping the sales team to showcase and present options more efficiently than before, cutting down time and energy spent previously on physical walkthroughs.
He said that a lot of hotels are using the Spalba tools today for internal staff training and capacity building and also for centralising most of the sales activities related to venues.
When asked about future plans in terms of expanding the reach of the platform, Puri said that they are in the process of expanding the B2B SaaS tool to a SaaS B2B marketplace targeting event planners and other enterprises in the MICE business.
And on the product enhancements side, Puri said that they are currently working on tech upgradation including building an additional AI layer which would communicate directly with the clients and understand the requirements before offering the solution. Recognising the complexities involved in the pricing of venues, which is often finalised through negotiations, Puri said that they are also exploring developing predictive pricing models with help of data analytics and machine learning tools at some stage.