Cvent Hitches Up With Wedding Spot to Boost Venue Business

Cvent, which is best known as a business-to-business platform connecting event venues and meeting planners, is entering the lucrative weddings market by acquiring San Francisco-based Wedding Spot for an undisclosed amount.

Wedding Spot, which was founded by David Ko and Tina Hoang-To in 2013, raised $3.2 million in Series A funding in 2013 and was later acquired by Honeybook, which is funded by Silicon Valley heavyweights like Citi Ventures. The company offers more than 12,000 venues in the U.S. on its platform for booking by event planners, and claims to have facilitated 10 million bookings since launch.

Sources say Honeybook put Wedding Spot on the block earlier this year, ostensibly looking to focus on its core products offering project and client management solutions.

“Over the past 20 years, we have powered the global meetings and events ecosystem, connecting event professionals with hotels and venues to help them grow and own their business,” said Reggie Aggarwal, CEO and founder of Cvent, in a release. “With Wedding Spot, we can offer new ways for our hospitality customers to tap into the $100 billion wedding industry while also expanding our venue sourcing options with thousands of unique special event venues across the United States.”

The move announced Wednesday makes sense for Cvent, which will now offer access to couples looking for wedding spaces to properties on its Cvent Supplier Network, which numbers more than 260,000 hotels and spaces. The market for weddings is huge, totaling more than $100 billion in spending annually. Wedding Spot processes 200,000 requests each year, and Cvent will create a new category for wedding spaces on its platform.

“Cvent has led the digital transformation of the meetings and events industry, and we are thrilled to continue the Wedding Spot journey with them,” said Yotam Soen, general manager of Wedding Spot, in a release. “Cvent continues to find new and better ways to bring event buyers and venues together, which aligns with our mission at Wedding Spot. We’re looking forward to continuing to work with all of our customers as part of Cvent.”

Appealing to planners and couples designing weddings is a major challenge for hotels, particularly those looking to fill their meeting spaces on a regular basis. While not as lucrative as a large scale conference, weddings represent a solid pillar of business for hotels which will now have access to a variety of leads directly through Cvent’s existing systems.

Cvent is no stranger to acquisitions, snapping up Washington, D.C.-based Social Tables in October 2018 for more than $100 million after buying Lanyon and various other companies to cement its role as alpha dog in the event technology space earlier this decade.

Diving into weddings and event design shows an industry powerhouse looking to bring in product offerings that fill holes in its current line of products.