The market for event systems: where is it actually heading?

The market for event systems: where is it actually heading?

It's easy to assume the PMS and event systems market is a finished story — that the big players have already won, and the rest of us are just choosing between a handful of established names. That's not quite right. The market is still growing sharply: global event management software is estimated at somewhere between 6 and 18 billion dollars in 2026, depending on which analyst you ask and how narrowly they define the category, with annual growth somewhere between 9 and 14 percent over the next few years. Those aren't numbers that suggest a mature, settled market. They're numbers that suggest a market still figuring out its own shape.

The question worth asking as a conference hotel or course venue isn't "which system is biggest." It's: which direction is the market moving in, and what does that mean for us in three or four years — not just today?

Consolidation — but on whose terms?

The clearest movement right now is consolidation. Buyers increasingly prefer all-in-one solutions that replace fragmented point tools for registration, engagement, communication, and analytics, rather than stitching together five separate services themselves. That sounds sensible, and it usually is — right up until you ask who is consolidating around what.

Here the market splits, in practice, into two philosophies, most clearly illustrated by the three major international PMS players: Cloudbeds has built an all-in-one platform funded by roughly 250 million dollars from investors including SoftBank, aimed at the independent hotels that make up the bulk of the market. Mews has instead built a more sophisticated, modular ecosystem where the platform itself handles the complexity. Apaleo, the smallest of the three, goes a step further and builds pure infrastructure — an API-first foundation on which the hotel assembles its own best-of-breed tools.

Notice what actually distinguishes these. It isn't the feature lists. It's how much control you're handing over to a single vendor in exchange for everything "just working." It's worth asking yourselves outright: do you want one system that does everything for you, or do you want to keep the option of swapping out parts of the stack later without rebuilding everything? That isn't a technical question. It's a question about how much you trust a single vendor over the next ten years.

Consolidation is also happening at the company level, not just the product level. Eventbrite was acquired by the Italian tech company Bending Spoons in a deal worth around 500 million dollars — agreed in December 2025, completed in March 2026. This is worth noting regardless of whether you use Eventbrite yourselves: shortly after taking over, the new owner cut a significant share of the staff and rolled out major product changes. When well-known brands change owners, priorities often shift quickly along with them — support, roadmap, and staffing can change within months, without the customer having any say in the matter.

AI is no longer a differentiator — it's an expectation

We recently wrote about why a proper API is the precondition for AI to become real rather than just a demo. The market numbers confirm why this matters now: growth in the event systems market is now driven in large part by AI-driven personalization that improves attendee engagement, alongside mandatory sustainability reporting that's increasing demand for carbon-analytics modules. At the same time, industry surveys report that optimism among meeting and event professionals is at a five-year high, with AI and analytics topping investment plans for 2026.

The interesting question is no longer whether a vendor has AI. Everyone claims they do now. The question is how much of it is actually built into their workflow, and how much is a chatbot glued onto an old system because the board asked for an AI strategy. We'd argue — with the obvious conflict of interest that comes with saying so, since we build some of this ourselves — that the simplest test is to ask concretely: which task does the AI solve completely, without anyone having to fix it afterward? If the answer is vague, it's probably because there isn't a concrete one yet.

The European market demands different things than the American one

North America is still the largest market by far, with the clearly dominant global market share, driven by a dense network of event companies and technology firms across the US and Canada. But Europe isn't just a smaller copy of the American market — it has its own requirements that shape which vendors actually win here.

Hybrid events are stronger in Europe than many assume, with adoption around 58 percent, driven by major trade shows and public-sector events. Even more relevant for us: data protection and privacy features are now embedded in over 65 percent of European platform deployments, to meet the region's strict requirements. This is no longer a marginal detail — it has become a baseline expectation in European tenders, not an add-on negotiated afterward.

This is actually good news for Nordic and Norwegian vendors, for a reason that's easy to overlook: an American system built for the American market has to work hard to catch up on exactly this point. A system born with Norwegian VAT handling, EHF invoicing, and European data residency as its starting point doesn't retrofit this later — it was there from day one. The question worth asking an international vendor, then, isn't "can you support this," but "how long have you supported this, and how many customers actually use it in production today."

AI is also changing who gets to compete at all

It's easy to assume AI mainly strengthens the big players — more data, more capital to build models, more resources for research. That's true to some extent. But it's worth looking at the other side of the equation, because it matters just as much in a market with many small, specialized vendors: AI is lowering the cost of building and running a system to a level that was unthinkable a few years ago.

A small, newly started vendor used to need an entire team to build what a large player had already built over ten years — support documentation, an in-product help function, follow-up on offers by email, a revenue management model. Today, much of this can be built by a small team in months rather than years, because language models can handle a large share of the heavy lifting that used to require dedicated departments. That doesn't mean it becomes free or easy. It means the gap between "small, new player" and "large, established player" is shrinking on exactly the fronts where size used to be the decisive advantage.

This opens up something that's easy to miss in the big market reports, which are naturally written with the largest players as the frame of reference: a small Nordic vendor can today offer a help assistant built on its own documentation, an email-to-lead function, or a revenue management suggestion — things that five years ago required an entire development team and a couple of years of accumulated training data. It doesn't level everything out. A small vendor still has fewer integrations, a shorter brand history, and less capital behind it. But on exactly the fronts where AI actually matters — automating repetitive tasks, help and documentation, first drafts of offers and pricing — the bar for building something that competes on function, not just price, is lower than it has ever been.

That raises an honest question back at you as a customer, not just at us as a vendor: is a vendor's size still a reasonable proxy for how well the system actually solves your problem, or is it becoming a habit of judgment left over from a time when size and quality were more tightly linked than they are today?

The challenge nobody likes to say out loud: lock-in

The consolidation trend has a shadow side that rarely comes up in the sales meeting. The more everything is gathered into one platform, the more expensive it becomes to leave it later. This isn't a hypothetical concern — it's the actual business model of several of the major players: if the platform becomes essential infrastructure for your operation, the switching cost grows a little more every year.

That doesn't mean all-in-one is the wrong choice. For many hotels, it's the right one. But it does mean the question "what does it cost to leave you" should be asked before you sign, not when you're actually considering switching five years later and discover the answer is "it's complicated." We've written about this in more detail in our post on API access, but it's worth repeating briefly here: a vendor who shows you the export path out without hesitating says something very different about themselves than one who goes vague when the question comes up.

Which segment you actually belong to decides which advice applies

One last observation that's easy to forget when reading general market reports: the advice that applies to a 300-room chain hotel in Frankfurt doesn't necessarily apply to a Norwegian course venue with 60 rooms and a heavily seasonal operation. The large, general platforms are usually built and priced with an average hotel in mind — an average that rarely exists in the Nordics, where seasonal swings, the combination of accommodation and conferences, and a small but demanding regulatory framework aren't the exception, they're the norm.

That doesn't mean large, international platforms are the wrong choice for Norwegian conference hotels. Some of you genuinely need the breadth they offer. But it's worth asking yourselves honestly: is our assessment built around what suits an average hotel globally, or what actually suits our operation, with the seasons and the regulations we actually have?

The questions worth carrying forward

We won't land on one answer here, because there isn't one right answer for everyone. But here are the questions we think are worth asking yourselves, regardless of which vendor you end up choosing:

How much control are you willing to hand over to a single vendor, in exchange for everything "just working"? What does it actually cost to leave the platform the day you eventually want to — and have you gotten a concrete answer to that, or just a promise? Are the AI features you're being sold something that solves a real task in your own operation, or a general demonstration that the vendor is keeping up with the times? And finally: is the decision you're about to make shaped around an average hotel somewhere in Europe, or shaped around you?