Online event booking software that automates how you manage events

Streamline how you manage event calendars and bookings plus clients, sales and billings with our all-in-one event scheduling software

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1 OF 20+ TOOLS IN OUR PLATFORM

Online booking + scheduling tools are included in the Planning Pod software suite

INCLUDED IN THE FOLLOWING PRODUCTS:

Venue Management Software

Perfect for event centers, hotels, restaurants, corporate facilities, non-profit venues and reception halls.

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Event Management Software

Ideal for managing event planning for corporate events, meetings, weddings, galas, fundraisers and more.

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"With Planning Pod, this is the first time in my career I can manage my event bookings, calendars and CRM as well as sales and billing in one system."
- Dianne Kohler, Camrose Regional Exhibition

Dianne Kohler, Camrose Regional Exhibition

4.89 out of 5 stars

More than +20K event professionals and venues rely on our event management software tools to streamline their booking processes!

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See why our industry-best event booking system is preferred by more event venues and event planners

Full-featured online event booking calendar

With our event scheduling software, venue managers and event organizers alike can view events, tasks and more in real-time, on any device, via a color-coded booking calendar. Access calendar or timeline views and filter to see due dates for payments and tasks. Set customizable alerts for time or space conflicts to avoid double bookings. Set holds on dates for leads who need time to decide. Sync with other e-calendars like Google, Outlook and Apple.

Take in and track event space bookings

Our venue booking software offers functionality for venue managers and staff to quickly view current bookings and availability in a timeline view. Set up unlimited venues and event spaces - including meeting rooms, ballrooms, foyers and banquet halls - and easily assign event spaces to bookings. Get notification alerts for potential double bookings. Embed an availability calendar along with a lead intake form into your venue’s website. Instantly attach floor plan layout templates for each space/room you assign to a booking.

Manage appointments and tasks

Much more than an events calendar, our event booking engine also features the ability to schedule appointments for client meetings, calls, walkthroughs and site tours. Coming soon, you can share appointment links with clients so they can set appointments with you on-the-fly. Also included is task management functionality to assign tasks and set email and text reminders for staff and clients, plus build task list templates you can import into events.

Stay in touch with clients via event CRM tools

Included our all-in-one online event management platform are event CRM tools that automate client management. Collect leads and online bookings from your website with customizable webforms. Manage leads through your sales pipeline and track contact details, events and documents assigned to clients. Manage communications via a central email inbox that integrates with your existing email addresses. Let clients view and sign documents, make payments and more via online client portals.

Boost revenues with sales and billing tools

Finally, we simplify how you can turn each event booking into a reliable revenue stream. Create colorful event proposals and online contracts for which you can collect electronic signatures. Manage all your event-related food-&-beverage orders and invoicing. Collect online payments via our credit card payment processing partners. Set up payment reminders and auto-payments for installments. And if you require ticketing, create event websites and collect event registrations online.

Calendar

FYI ... If you’re interested in event booking software tools, you may also like our: Event CRM ManagerEvent Email Communications ToolContracts and e-Signatures ToolEvent Invoicing and Payments Manager


USED BY 20,000+ EVENT PROFESSIONALS

What’s inside our user-friendly, Web-based booking and event management software

See why more venues and event planners rely on our event scheduling software solutions for streamlining their booking calendars, CRM, sales, billings and more

Color-Coded Calendars

Access a real-time online event booking calendar anytime via any device (PC, Mac, iPhone, iPad, Android). Color-coded calendar items let you see at-a-glance which events they relate to.

Event Space Management

Set up multiple venues and event rooms or meeting spaces under each venue (including capacities). Then you can quickly add a room or space to a lead or event.

Appointment Scheduling

Set appointments for meetings with clients or staff as well as calls and site visits. Create automated email or text reminders. And give clients links to schedule appointments themselves.

Time/Space Conflict Alerts

Ensures your booking process is protected against double bookings. Customize your settings when you and your staff should be alerted for any conflicts or potential double bookings.

Task Management

Create tasks on-the-fly for staff and clients and link them to an event or lead. Set email and text reminders. Great for event planning tasks or booking-related tasks or assignments.

Views & Filters

Track your bookings, appointments and more with multiple views, including event vs. room/space view, calendar vs. timeline view. Manage filters for viewing payment and task due dates.

Lead Tracking + Holds

View tentative dates for leads on your bookings calendar. Add holds to these tentative dates to give prospects time to decide, and set a deadline date and reminder for when the hold expires.

Automations & Workflows

Our event scheduling platform lets you create email and text reminders for appointments, tasks and invoice / budget payments. Create workflows to automate processes for lead management, billing and payments.

Embeddable Webforms + Calendars

Want to capture leads on your website AND show website visitors when your spaces are available? Use our real-time, mobile-friendly lead webform with embeddable calendar to collect online bookings.

Integrations With E-Calendars

Do you currently use Google, Outlook, Apple or other electronic calendars in your organization? You can sync your Planning Pod booking calendar to most other e-calendars in seconds.

Event CRM Manager

Our all-in-one event management solution offers tools for contact management and assignments, lead pipeline tracking, email communications, client portals, online forms and more.

Sales & Billing

Build reusable templates for proposals, contracts, food-&-beverage packages (w/ pricing) and invoices. Collect online signatures. Create BEOs on-the-fly. Collect online payments and schedule payment reminders.


Learn more about our event and venue management solutions for venue / event managers, sales managers and event planners


RECENT POST
Jeff Kear · Owner, Planning Pod

How to find the best event booking software for your business


Whether you work at an event space, restaurant, caterer, hotel, hospitality group or wedding venue or are a meeting, wedding or event planner, managing your event booking process can be a huge hassle if you don’t have the right tools or processes in place.

Fortunately, in the last decade, many event management software-as-a-service products (SaaS for short) have offered event booking software functionality as part of their toolkits, making it easier for businesses in the hospitality and event industry to manage their bookings online and create successful events for their clients.

However, not all event booking software suites are built the same or offer the same features. Some are more self-service platforms, providing only event booking calendars, online booking forms and payment processing. Others include event CRM, sales and invoicing and catering/food-&beverage management tools. Yet others offer event planning tools (like task management, event timelines, event budgets and event registrations and ticketing), event design functionality (for creating event floor plan and room layouts) and event marketing tools like event websites, mobile apps and social media integrations.

So what is the right event technology choice for you? Well, it depends on your needs and what you need to accomplish for your business. So your first objective in choosing the best event booking software system is to first create a list of your needs and what specific functions you need a booking system to do for you. Start with the first item in your event workflow and think through the entire event lifecycle, listing out each step and function you require along the way. Once you have this list, it makes it much easier to assess and find software solutions that fit the bill.

For starters, here are a few things to consider upfront, like do you need…

  • A few users or unlimited users - that is, if you need to share tools with many staff and/or clients.
  • A web-based system - like if you or your employees work remotely; if you need a platform that can be used on mobile devices or tablets (iOS and Android); or if you want your data securely stored remotely so you don’t lose it in case of disaster (like a fried hard drive).
  • A user-friendly interface - make sure the application is easy to navigate and intuitive so you aren’t spinning your wheels trying to track down features or clicking too many times to input data.
  • Something that integrates with other platforms - if you need to connect to another electronic calendar, accounting software like Quickbooks, external CRMs like Salesforce or merchant payment processing providers.

Beyond those options, here are what kinds of functionality you can expect to see in various event booking management software systems.

Standard Functionality

These items are commonly found among the top event booking software apps, including platforms like Planning Pod as well as Tripleseat, Ungerboeck, Event Pro, Event Temple, Function Tracker, Priava and Skedda.

Booking Calendar

Pretty much all booking engines of any worth feature a booking calendar front-and-center, with the ability to view booked events and availability in real-time, manage space/room assignments, offer multiple subcalendars (for events, spaces, personal use, etc.) and views (grid vs. digest vs. timeline, or events / appointments vs venue room/space reservations).

Event Space and Meeting Room Management

Most event venues, wedding venues, hotel and hospitality groups, performing arts centers, restaurants and caterers that manage event spaces (and even unique venues like wineries and museums) have an unending need not only to track their event bookings but also the event and meeting rooms and spaces where those events will occur.

As such, they require a special set of venue booking software tools to manage these spaces and make sure they never double book them. This can include functionality for tracking room bookings for single or multi-venue setups; real-time availability views to let people know instantly what spaces you have open and when; and the ability to set customizable room schedules with reservation times that extend before and after the actual event times to account for setup and teardown.

Appointment Scheduling

No event scheduling software is complete without the ability to also schedule appointments for in-house/staff meetings as well as client meetings, calls and walkthroughs. Big props for those event booking systems that offer a view/filter of appointments apart from room/space reservations and that provide scheduling links you can share with clients and prospects so they can schedule their own appointments for when you are available to meet.

Event CRM

Booking management is something that most full-featured event CRM software systems offer along with tools for managing contact details; client documents and assignments; lead tracking and client communications (see below); and other client touchpoints. More robust platforms offer tools like client portals and online webforms/surveys in order to streamline client interactions.

Email Communications

Although now an older technology, email is still the main method of communication between venues and event planners and their clients and prospects (although text messaging has become more popular in recent years). As such, event space booking software should be able to integrate with your existing email addresses so you can send and receive email messages from inside the application, including email notifications, reminders and alerts for customers.

Sales and Lead Management

Until a client has signed on the bottom line, they don’t yet qualify as a booked event. This is why many event and venue booking software solutions provide lead management tools for tracking leads and their prospective event dates/times … so that you can seamlessly track everything in one place instead of having data split between a booking system and a separate sales management tool like Salesforce. Extra credit goes to those solutions that offer embeddable lead capture webforms and online availability calendars for collecting leads on your website and even accepting online bookings with payment processing.

Integrations and Workflows

If you are like most venues and event planners and use multiple pieces of software to run your business (like Quickbooks for accounting, Gmail or Outlook for email, MailChimp for marketing communications, etc.), you will need event scheduling software that is able to integrate with those other tools. Look for systems that connect to integration platforms like Zapier, which lets you share data across hundreds of different applications.

Also, event booking systems that are more of an all-in-one platform sometimes offer customizable workflows you can set up that provide shortcuts and automations for things you typically do manually. Examples of this at work are having the system automatically send out an invoice when a proposal or contract is signed or adding a new prospect to an email drip campaign when the prospect submits a webform on your website.

Customer Support and Training

Having a load of tools and features is a great start, but if you don’t have the assistance and training to use them properly, then they don’t do you much good. So you should check with the SaaS software provider to make sure they have customer support (email, live chat, phone) as well as offer training (often in the form of live webinars and custom sessions). Also check to make sure training is included in the packages you are considering.

Invoicing and Payments

Besides creating amazing attendee experiences, getting paid is what keeps event professionals and venues in business and thriving. So your event booking engine should also provide for invoicing and online payment processing solutions. Ideally, you should be able to easily invoice your clients electronically, be able to set up payment schedules and reminders and collect debit and credit card payments as well as ACH payments.

Reporting and Dashboards

It’s hard to know where you are going if you don’t know where you’ve been or if you don’t know the current status of your events. Comprehensive, at-a-glance dashboards can provide you with a real-time look at all the activity with your events and what needs to be done. And downloadable reports can compile essential event data like sales and event ROI details, payments, open invoices and account activity.

Bonus Functionality

These are items that are typically found in all-in-one event booking software platforms (like Planning Pod as well as Tripleseat, Ungerboeck, Skedda and Priava) but may not be included in platforms that specialize in calendaring and online booking functionality only.

Event Floor Plan Software Tools

Event layout tools can play an important role in maintaining client relationships (that is, clearly communicating your design ideas to clients) and in streamlining in-house pre-event preparations for setting up events. As such, some booking and event management platforms offer event floor plan tools for creating to-scale templates of your event spaces that you can pull into your events and create a layout/setup based on a customer’s specifications. These tools can also play a role in attendee management if they integrate with a guest list tool so you can create assigned seating plans.

Catering Management

For those event venues, hotels, restaurants and caterers that offer on-premise or off-premise food-&-beverage services for events, a set of catering software tools will come in handy (especially if they integrate with booking and billing functionality). Such features, which are often found in venue management software solutions, can include banquet event orders (BEOs), food-&-beverage item management, food menus and packages, kitchen prep sheets and delivery and setup sheets.

Event Planning Tools

Many booking and event management systems include event planning software tools, like project management features for tracking timelines and schedules, task lists, budgets, attendees, exhibitors, sponsorships and vendors. These tools for overseeing the event planning process are a great addition for solo event and wedding planners, corporate event managers, trade show directors and nonprofits that manage and launch their own events.

Event Ticketing and Online Registrations

If promoting, planning and/or hosting paid events (or free events requiring signups) is part of your business strategy, then having an event scheduling software platform that helps you manage the ticketing and event registration process is a must.

For starters, there are the tools that let you manage ticket sales, including custom ticket setup with pricing schedules, online event registration forms with questionnaires and online payment processing. Next are event marketing tools - like event websites, bulk email marketing and social media account integrations - followed by attendee management tools like attendee / guest list managers, ticket order tracking, event seating plans and at-the-door event check-in and registration tools. Your provider may also offer tools for managing exhibitors and sponsors and collecting payments from them.

Attendee Experience / Attendee Engagement

If you are planning/hosting events and using tools to sell tickets, then you are also likely interested in how you can enhance attendee engagement for your events. To be honest, it’s not very common for event booking systems to offer tools like mobile apps for events (including personal schedule building, in-app networking, gamification, live polling, etc.), email marketing outreach to potential and actual attendees and social media outreach tools (like you would find with an application like Hootsuite).

However, some attendee-focused event management software applications do offer these features for enhancing the event experience (like Eventbrite and Cvent), and some event booking systems like Planning Pod integrate with platforms that cover these needs.

Virtual Events / Hybrid Events

The coronavirus pandemic has brought virtual events front and center, but many event organizers have been planning and producing virtual and hybrid events for many years prior.

Again, webinar, online conferencing and virtual event management is often beyond the purview of event scheduling software. However, there are a number of virtual event platforms like Zoom, GoToMeeting, Cvent, Boomset and ON24 that can handle video streaming and recording, event registration and ticket sales, event marketing via email and social media, event websites for virtual event registrations, mobile event apps, attendee management and guest lists and virtual check-in. And platforms like Planning Pod can integrate with them so you can share data across platforms when you need to.


Learn more about our solutions for event planners and venues