Success Stories: Visit.brussels

Visit.brussels buyer and sellers DMC virtual workshop

Visit.brussels is a communication agency funded by the Belgian government that focuses on promoting and strengthening the image of Brussels as a major touristic and cultural hub.

This is the third time we worked with visit.brussels. For this particular event, we connected the partners of visit.brussels with a series of Destination Management Companies(=DMC) buyer and sellers that were interested in Brussels as a destination and the different products offered by their partners.

Overview

Multidirectional sales

Our main objective was to stimulate sales in both directions for buyer and sellers, meaning that Brussels would become more present in the destinations offered by the DMCs mentioned. If they were already selling Brussels as a destination, our aim was to convince them to offer additional products (e.g. beer tasting, guided tour by bike…) which would make the program much more attractive for the end customer.

Approach

Three step onboarding

The first step in the onboarding process was the registration of the participants. In this case visit.brussels had already prepared a list of participants that we imported into the MeetMatch buyer seller app. This included additional information such as language, company name and logo. Further info was added by the participants themselves in our second step where they could set up a rich and fully customisable data profile which we also used for matchmaking. The DMC agencies could select from the complete participant list who they wanted to meet during the speed networking sessions. In this list we added a personal matching tag with their most interesting matches.

Auto- planned meetings

Once all participants had completed their onboarding our scheduling algorithm was able to generate the speed networking schedules within 2 minutes. Afterwards, together with visit.brussels, we carried out some fine-tuning of the schedule.

Matchmaking

We mainly used matchmaking as a guide for the attendees to select visit.brussel partners from a participant list. Important here was that the profiles of the partners contained relevant information so the DMC agencies were able to make educated decisions on who they wanted to meet.

Event structure

The fully virtual event kicked off via a live stream from our plenary room welcoming all participants. Participants were then automatically directed to their 1-on-1 speed networking meeting. The duration of each meeting was set to 10 minutes and every 4 meetings there was a short intermission of 5 minutes. In total participants could enjoy 20 speed networking meetings but if participants had an open meeting slot they were automatically redirected to a group session where they could enjoy a discussion panel of inhouse specialists from visit.brussels