Exhilarating, inspiring, exhausting, profitable, incredible, enormous, crazy. Just some of the adjectives we used to describe this year’s Dublin Web Summit which Roomex attended on all three days. The record 22,000 delegates held 10,000 face to face meetings fuelled by over 100,000 cups of coffee served by Nespresso alone. Not bad for an event that only started four years ago with 400 attendees. Oh, and the Wi-Fi wasn’t great.
Behind the headlines and hype, Dublin Web Summit is a trade fair for technology businesses. Despite the ever-expanding range of stages and add-ons the key focus of the event is on connecting technology companies and real business deals are struck, follow-up meetings planned and connections made, that’s the focus part. Our business model was validated by some of the brightest minds in the business who loved the simple efficiency of what we do. We stood out against many other exhibitors by being not just tech for tech’s sake but by using technology as a modern way to solve a very old world corporate travel agency problem of booking hotels for business travel.
Several of our clients from the technology space were also in attendance, they rely on Roomex to be flexible enough to match their rapid growth and diversification and as an agile young company that is a challenge we are ready for.
By constantly improving the service and iterating continuously we add new features and functionality which makes saving time and money on hotel spend all the more straightforward. Key to the influence of technology is the growth in mobile with over 40% of Americans booking travel through a smartphone in the first six months of 2014. The figures in corporate travel are lower but the point holds true and we have been aware of this trend and had mobile functionality for many months.
