Our previous two articles covered the critical importance of maintaining your digital “curb appeal” and how sophisticated chatbots like ChatGPT and Gemini are and are not changing what it means to have digital “curb appeal” in 2026. The key point: getting your digital house in order is, in most cases, only enough to prevent you from losing business as opposed to being enough to actually win it.
Now, we’re not here to tell you how to give the perfect venue tour or craft the perfect closing pitch. You know your business, your customers. What we can offer in the way of insight is the hard data that comes with running a marketplace with more than 100,000 businesses and 1 million planners visiting every month.
So, here goes.
Speed matters, and the definition of speed is getting faster
We haven’t exactly been shy about the importance of replying to planners quickly over the years. In fact, it’s almost all we talk about once we get past profile quality (good photos, pricing, etc.) And that’s because it is the bedrock of turning what you get from our platform into actual business.
If you aren’t willing or able to get back to someone asking about your space quickly—we’ll talk about what “quickly” means in a moment—then, the truth is, Eventective isn’t going to work for you. Our account managers will coach you on this. Our reporting tools will show you how you’re doing and how you stack up against the competition in your area. It’s why our response templates and Reply Assistant features exist.
Two factors are conspiring to make this even more important than it was a few years ago: skyrocketing consumer expectations and general economic pessimism, driven by the stubbornly persistent inflation of the post-COVID years.
Let’s start with the consumer expectations piece. We’ve spent years telling customers that they should respond to inquiries on Eventective within 12-24 hours. That was based on research we conducted five years ago, and our updated research from this year makes it clear that that expectation is only likely to accelerate as demographics shift.
While most planners still expect a response within a day or two, Gen Z—the youngest generational cohort we surveyed—skews even quicker. Sixteen percent of Gen Z respondents expected to hear back within an hour.
Sure, most of them are a bit more laid-back, with 55 percent expecting to hear back in a day or two, but the 16 percent figure is big enough to redefine just what a quick response time means. Not only is the 1-hour group a statistically significant minority within their generational cohort, but with Gen Z headed for middle age, their norms will increasingly become the standard as they age into milestone gatherings (weddings, showers, etc.) and Millennials age out. When we last ran the survey, Gen Z represented just 8 percent of the population planning parties. This time around, they accounted for 28 percent.
Compounding the impact of those increasingly impatient planners are the macroeconomic conditions surrounding them. Our first article in this series covered this at length, but, in short, there are fewer people planning events now than there were a few years ago, which, in turn, means there are more people trying to win any given planner’s business.
What does this look like in the extreme? Well, in September, one planner heard from 14 different businesses in the first hour after sending an inquiry. Another had to sift through 29 responses from businesses just 12 hours after submitting an inquiry.
Go back to September 2022: planners using Eventective to reach out to businesses received responses from an average of 1.91 businesses. Fast forward to September 2026, and that figure has grown by 33 percent to 2.54. The response rate of businesses to planners in 2022 was 52 percent, as opposed to 62 percent now.
Back then, in the post-COVID days when demand for in-person gatherings was about as high as it’s ever been, the struggle was to keep up with all the inbound. Now, the question facing event businesses is how to stand out in an environment where a shrinking volume of planners is making the competition for attention steep.
As is often the case, our customers say it better than us:
"You have to be quick about it. A lot of people just want to get their events taken care of. They want to book something, get it off their plate, and move on to whatever else they have going on for that day,” says Julie DiStefano-Walker, National Sales Director of Tin Roof Bars. “If you're the first person to get back to them and you're reasonable and helpful, they'll sign with you and move on. If you're taking 24, 34, or 72 hours to get back to somebody, just know that you've already eliminated yourself."
So there you have it. Speedy replies are table stakes for staying in the game when you pursue new business. Event businesses across the U.S. and Canada are having to do more with less, which can make the notion of always being on top of new business inquiries feel overwhelming.
Unfortunately, planners are unlikely to have any real sympathy for this state of affairs when they’re on the hunt for event services. Indeed, in an environment where supply-and-demand dynamics have tipped heavily in their favor, they are likely to be even less forgiving than they were a few years ago. After all, there are likely to be plenty of businesses out there willing—perhaps even desperate—to meet (or exceed) their expectations.
In our final article in this series, we’ll look at how you can still maintain quality in your outreach as you move at speeds that planners have come to expect. In the meantime, feel free to reach out to our team for a consult on how you’re meeting the need for speed, or review the rest of the series below.
