Hilton Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport | Cvent Event Diagramming & MICE Business Webpage

Introduction 

Hilton Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport is a hotel located at the heart of Charles de Gaulle airport terminals – just thirty minutes from Paris city centre. Because of its proximity to the airport, the hotel has become a popular location for meetings and events as well as business travel.  

The hotel consists of 392 bedrooms, 25 meeting rooms and a 700 square meter ballroom, the largest in the Northeast of Paris as well as leisure facilities such as a heated pool and fitness centre. Since their doors opened in 1994, the property has been a part of the Hilton brand – a brand consisting of more than 2000 hotels worldwide.  

With the lingering pandemic, the hotel began working with Cvent increase the safety of their events and make the way they work with clients more collaborative and easier.  

“One of the benefits of being on Cvent is that it is platform that you’re in front of a lot of people working within the event industry. You automatically know that you will get more business than if you weren’t on the platform.”

Halimata Sy, Deputy Director of Sales, Hilton Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport

The Challenge 

For Hilton Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport, earning MICE business relies heavily on them being able to showcase their meeting and event space sufficiently to the client. Hampered by the pandemic, travel restrictions and lockdowns, the hotel needed to find an alternative way to conduct site tours for event planners who couldn’t travel. 

“We all have floor plans. But not all hotels have the Cvent Event Diagramming tool. We’re moving into an era where people appreciate not having to look at a PDF or a website. They want instead a user-friendly tool that allows them to customise the spaces and collaborate in real-time with us.”

Halimata Sy, Deputy Director of Sales, Hilton Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport

And with the rising need for safer, successful events which protect attendees and satisfy government guidelines, it was imperative that the hotel could help the planner ensure social distancing and well configured seating arrangements.  

In addition, Halimata Sy, Deputy Director of Sales at Hilton Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport added that prior to the pandemic, their “largest meeting room of 700 square meters wasn't very well known”. They needed a way to market it and attract more customers.  

The Solution & Benefits 

Hilton Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport found that Cvent Event Diagramming, formerly Social Tables, and their MICE Business Webpage, were the perfect ways to conduct virtual viewings, ensure safer event set ups and market the spaces to more customers. Having the Event Diagramming tool, according to Halimata, allowed them to market their hotel more effectively as they found that it was attractive to planners searching and filtering on the Cvent Supplier Network. “Utilising Cvent Event Diagramming really helped us market the ballroom and attract more customers,” Halimata said. She added that this was aided by the fact that the tool is user-friendly and easy to use.  

This was particularly useful when a client wanted to know if they could fit a car inside the hotel’s boardroom for an event. Halimata says that the Cvent Event Diagramming 3D rendering tool allowed them to show the client that they could have space to have his car within the room as well as tables and chairs for delegates. She adds: “That really helped us as it won us the business in the end.” 

“Hilton Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport’s relationship with Cvent is special because reports are always on point. Whenever we need information, we can get it very quickly. We can go into the system and look at our profile to see the last bookings that we had in in a very specific period.”

Halimata Sy, Deputy Director of Sales, Hilton Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport

In addition, the tool came to be a great help when the pandemic hit, from being able to show the space adequately to planners who couldn’t physically be at the hotel to having the ability to configure the space for social distancing: “We are able to showcase the space with social distancing between every participant,” says Halimata. “We can show them how the entire room could be used and organised to make sure that we could fit all the participants within that room.” Once the diagram is made up, they can use Diagram Check, which is configured to their pre-set guidelines, to check that the seating arrangement is correct and safe.  

Halimata also attributes a lot of the success she’s had during the pandemic to their MICE Business Webpage which is visible on the hotel’s Cvent Supplier Network profile. “There was one group that signed an event with us thanks to the MICE Business Webpage because the client was based in Germany,” she said. “Because they couldn’t make it to the hotel for a site visit, the MICE Business Webpage and Diagramming tool allowed us to showcase our spaces. When they were able to travel to us, they already had a firm understanding of our spaces.”  

Since using the tool, Halimata reported an uptick in Cvent Supplier Network profile visits: “Because Cvent Event Diagramming is integrated within our Cvent profile, it gives us more views of our profile and also we have this MICE Business Webpage that we can use on the side which helps us to show our spaces to clients that may not be able to travel.” Having the Cvent Event Diagramming tool integrated with their profile allows them to appear in searches where planners are filtering by the tool.