MICE DESK receives Saxony's "Innovation Award"

We are extremely proud to have received approval for the "ERDF/JTF InnoPremium 2021 to 2027". Since probably not everyone knows what this premium entails and who decides on approval, we would like to briefly explain these points below. And then we will go into our planned project for which we have received the innovation premium.

In October 2023, the Saxon State Ministry of Economic Affairs, Labor and Transport called on companies in Saxony to submit their funding applications for research and development projects from the Just Transition Fund (JTF) for the 2021 to 2027 ERDF/JTF Technology Funding Guideline (FRL). This sounds very complicated and bureaucratic at first. But in a nutshell, it is about funding companies that want to use external services to develop new products and processes. The approved projects are then subsidized with a grant of €40,000.

MICE DESK submitted the application at the end of 2023 and has now received official approval. We are delighted to be able to implement our project with this support. Our aim is to drive forward innovative and intelligent technology so that we can offer our hotel customers the best possible service in the future.

But now to our planned project. Our team processes MICE requests for our customers on a daily basis, creates offers and contracts and enters all information into the PMS of the respective hotel. In order to further develop our MICE outsourcing product, we are working on the development of an innovative, AI-supported system that comprises two components:

• an AI language assistant for the qualification of incoming requests

• a system for checking availability in the hotel's PMS

This MICE software will be based on the latest research findings in machine learning and natural language processing (NLP). Thanks to automated processing, we will be able to optimize the analysis of customer inquiries and plan and deploy our internal resources much more effectively. The primary goal is to optimize our business processes and, of course, to increase customer satisfaction. The fact that we can process inquiries from event planners much more efficiently and quickly will improve the conversion rate of our hotel customers and increase customer loyalty in the long term.

As we know from the data we regularly collect for our benchmark report, the conversion of a MICE booking depends directly on the speed and quality of the processing of inquiries. In many hotels, a shortage of skilled staff and other challenges unfortunately mean that planners' inquiries are not answered at all or are answered too slowly. With us as your MICE outsourcing partner, this problem can be solved quickly and effectively. With the support of AI and innovative technology, our team of experts will be able to act even better for our customers in the future. In the long term, this will lead to increased sales with stable and predictable budgets.

The project is designed to run for a total period of six months. The first phase comprises research and development, followed by an implementation and test phase. We are supported by highly qualified external service providers and an internal project team.

We will report on the progress of the project here in our blog and on LinkedIn and are already looking forward to being able to present the first results.