The Story of Meeting Package: Building the Future of Venue Sales Management

The Story of Meeting Package: Building the Future of Venue Sales Management

At age 14, most teenagers are focused on school and social life. Joonas Ahola was building his first company. As he shared in a recent episode of Category Visionaries, being an entrepreneur wasn’t in his DNA – he was “kind of a black sheep of the family. No entrepreneurs in the whole family.” But that didn’t stop him from pursuing his entrepreneurial ambitions.

By 16, Joonas had launched his second venture, an event agency that would eventually operate nationwide in Finland. But success brought its own challenges. “Kind of fed up with the RFPs and the inquiries, like how traditional the business was, how unscalable it was,” he recalls. The seasonal nature of events made it particularly difficult: “If you are in a seasonal business in Finland, it’s super risky to hire full time employees for a business that is super sensitive to seasonalities.”

This frustration with traditional event management sparked an idea. What if there was a better way to handle venue bookings? In 2016, Meeting Package launched as a marketplace, attempting to become the Airbnb of meeting spaces. The vision was clear: streamline the booking process for meeting venues just like Airbnb had done for accommodations.

But reality proved more complex. “What we realized as being operational one, two years, like we launched in 2016 as a marketplace that will never fly in this industry,” Joonas explains. The fundamental problem? Hotels already had sophisticated systems in place. A simple marketplace wouldn’t integrate with their existing operations.

This realization led to a pivotal decision in 2018. Instead of competing with existing hotel systems, Meeting Package would enhance them. The company shifted from marketplace to enterprise software, focusing on “streamlining and automating the operations for meetings and events and group booking business, which is roughly 20% to 30% of hotels revenue in general.”

Then came COVID-19. With the hospitality industry at a standstill, many companies slashed their technology investments. Meeting Package took the opposite approach: “We decided that, okay, let’s rather shut down customer success and marketing and completely focus on engineering and R and D at that point.” This contrarian bet allowed them to emerge from the pandemic with superior technology.

The results speak for themselves. From marketplace-era conversion rates below 10%, Meeting Package now achieves “60% to 70% on average.” Their partnership-driven strategy turns former competitors into allies, creating a powerful distribution network.

Looking ahead, Joonas’s vision extends far beyond just improving hotel operations. “By 2027, we want to have 50,000 instantly bookable venues globally,” he declares. But the real goal is even more ambitious: “Our big vision is that we will be the biggest one at that point when that happens, where those vendors will fetch inventory pricing and make transactions.”

This positions Meeting Package to become the central infrastructure layer for the meetings and events industry – the system of record that connects venues, distributors, and customers. It’s a far cry from the marketplace they originally envisioned, but perhaps that’s the point. Sometimes the biggest opportunities aren’t in disrupting an industry, but in making it work better.

For Joonas, who started his entrepreneurial journey at 14, it’s the culmination of lessons learned across multiple ventures. The seasonal event business taught him about operational challenges. The marketplace taught him about industry dynamics. And COVID taught him about strategic focus. Now, all these lessons are converging into a vision for the future of venue management – one booking at a time.