'MICE Conversations'. In this episode we talk with Ciaran Delaney, founder and CEO of hubli and MeetingsBooker. Today, Tuesday 7th September 2021, MeetingsBooker has rebranded as hubli. Find out more on https://www.hubli.com. hubli empowers organisations to give teams space to succeed. Employees can access 185,000 spaces on-demand with in-built controls on spend, safety and sustainability. Meetingsbooker.com has evolved to now include group stays, workspaces and enterprise management platform.

More about hubli, MeetingsBooker and Ciaran Delaney.
https://www.hubli.com/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/ciarandel/
https://www.meetingsbooker.com/

Recorded Friday 3rd September 2021.

This pocast is also available as a video, on the TravelMedia.ie YouTube channel.
https://youtu.be/9Ivb42DqRIw

Topics and questions, timeline or video chapters.
00:00 - Intro and welcome.
00:30 - Background of MeetingBooker
01:42 - Was the recession the reason for setting it up in 09?
02:49 - Are there insights you can gain from what's happened over the last 18 months? Are there trends developing now that we're going back to work?
04:44 - Has there been an increase or decrease in meetings?
05:42 - A lot of organisations are hiring people remotely.
07:00 - White label route, in-house technology e.g. BP.
08:25 - hubli.com
10:01 - Evolution of MeetingsBooker
10:26 - Reason of re-branding & challenges
11:02 - Mission of hubli
13:30 - Are you targeting a certain audience? Is hubli.com suited to everyone?
14:46 - Where are you seeing take-up in terms of markets that are adapting to this new work environment?
16:04 - Future challenges
16:30 - Availability for spaces
18:02 - Focus of the business
20:13 - Where can we find out more about the product?
20:33 - Closing and outro.

Video transcript:
- So hello and welcome to "MICE Conversations." We are back after a short break from the summer. We were hopefully all taking some downtime during August. So it's great to be back and great to be back with Ciaran Delaney from MeetingsBooker. Ciaran, great to see you. Thank you for joining us today. I noticed some new branding on your top there, which we will discuss in a second. But first, if you could maybe just, for those who don't know you, maybe if you could give a little bit of background to MeetingsBooker, I know it was started in 2009 and before that you were with Tourism Ireland and also the City West Hotel here in Dublin. So if you could give us a little bit of background, Ciaran.

- Sure, yeah. So I started my career, Michael, with Tourism Ireland. So I spent seven years promoting Ireland as a tourism destination with Tourism Ireland in Italy actually, and also in Northern Europe. And I then took up a role as Director of Sales and Marketing for City West Hotel which is at the time a 1,000 bedroom conference hotel in Ireland. And yeah, and then in 2009, atthe brainwave of setting up my own business and becoming an entrepreneur. So I set up meetingsbooker.com in 2009 to really automate how people would discover places to meet and to allow them to easily book spaces online and to kind of automate that process and create a marketplace for MICE venues. Intrigued that you set it up in 2009, which obviously was the peak or height of the recession. Was there, I mean it's probably the best time to set up a business because if it doesn't work in a recession then it will never work. Was that the reason for setting up in 09?

- No. The hindsight is great. No, it just, I think it was just my career development, you know, it was the right time for me. I gained a lot of experience working internationally with Tourism Ireland and obviously at City West as well. So just, the timing was right for me personally, within the .......