What makes a meeting venue stand out in 2025? Based on insights gleaned from more than £456 million confirmed bookings made on our platform, it’s not the city, the size, or the branding - it’s how well venues help planners make fast and informed decisions.
That’s the story behind Venue Directory’s first-ever Top 50 Meeting Venue list.
Methodology
The Top 50 Meeting Venues list was curated using detailed booking data from the Venue Directory platform throughout 2024. Rankings consider multiple factors, including the volume of enquiries, confirmed bookings, conversion rates and response times. The focus was on venues that showed consistent engagement with planners by responding promptly, providing comprehensive information and maintaining strong communication.
A closer look at the top five
The top five venues all reflect what planners consistently look for: responsive communication, flexible spaces, the capacity to handle high volumes, and steady investment in the destination.
Topping the list is Holiday Inn Manchester City Centre, followed by Holiday Inn High Wycombe M40 Jct 4. Manchester’s popularity with event planners continues to rise, with four other venues from the city making it into the top 50.
Bristol tells a similar story. With its strong rail connections and growing knowledge economy, it’s become a regional favourite. Engineers House Conference Venue and Holiday Inn Express Bristol – Filton claimed third and fourth spots.
Rounding out the top five is Holiday Inn Express Birmingham NEC, recognised for its prime location and consistent performance.
Planners are booking across the UK
The 2025 Top 50 list includes venues from across England, Scotland and Wales. It’s not dominated by one region or a handful of large cities. There are entries from Manchester and Birmingham, yes, but also from Dunfermline, Reading, Southampton, and High Wycombe. This kind of spread suggests planners are making decisions based on how venues engage during the sourcing process, not just where they’re located.
The Top 50 list consists of a diverse mix of properties and brands, regional hotel groups, conference centres and a number of unique venues like sports stadiums and public buildings. Each of these venues serves a different type of event, in a different context, but they all showed the same behaviour: fast responses, flexible offering, useful detail early, and reliable follow-through. That’s what kept them competitive.
It’s clear from the rankings that planners are choosing venues that help them move quickly. With multiple briefs in play and less time to chase information, venues that help planners keep things moving get booked. The teams behind these high-performing venues know what planners are up against, and they’ve set up their workflows, communications, and proposal formats accordingly. That preparation is showing up in the numbers.
What these venues are doing right
1. They give planners what they need to move forward
The venues that performed well didn’t rely on planners to fill in the gaps. Their listings on Venue Directory included relevant, up-to-date information that assisted event organisers in making decisions faster. Capacities were broken down by room and configuration. These are baseline expectations that are often missed.
When such information is unavailable, planners can’t make decisions. It adds delays, introduces guesswork, and increases the number of back-and-forth emails just to confirm basic fit. The best venues removed that friction up front. They helped planners understand the space better. They showed what was possible and what wasn't, without waiting to be asked.
These venues also knew that being visible online isn’t enough. They ensured their listings were practical and easy for planners to use, and eventually turned this visibility into a real planning advantage that made choosing their place simpler.
2. Proposals that actually match the brief
Planners aren’t evaluating venues in isolation. Most are working across multiple briefs and coordinating with internal teams. A vague or generic reply not just leaves doubts, it also adds more work. The venues that performed best crafted their proposals that felt like a continuation of the request, not a reset. They provided enough clarity and context that planners could take what they received and present it to stakeholders without needing to rewrite or ask for more.
This approach saves time, but more importantly, it builds trust. Planners don't need long narratives; they need responses that reflect what they asked for and that help them find the right fit.
3. Availability is no longer about dates
Planners understand that plans change. What counts is how venues react when the first option isn’t available. Today, venues need to proactively suggest alternatives, whether that’s different dates, rooms or layouts that still fit the brief. This approach doesn’t feel like upselling or deflection; it comes across as genuine problem-solving.
Those kinds of responses make a difference early in the process. They reduce uncertainty, keep the dialogue going and help planners manage internal expectations without going back to square one. When a venue offers flexibility without hesitation, it signals that they understand what working under pressure looks like, and that makes it easier for planners to commit.
There’s no special system behind this. It’s just operational awareness. The teams that anticipated roadblocks and addressed them early created smoother booking experiences.
4. Support doesn’t end with the first reply
What set many of these venues apart wasn’t how they opened the conversation; it was how they stayed in it. Planners weren’t passed from team to team or left waiting once the proposal was sent. The venues that continued to receive bookings were the ones that kept lines of communication open through revisions, reviews and final approvals.
That kind of consistency gives planners room to work. There’s less pressure to chase updates or repeat requests and more confidence that the venue will be reliable when needed. It also makes it more convenient to adapt when requirements change, and they often do.
Strong follow-through doesn’t need to be complicated. It looks like responsiveness, steady contact and a sense that your team understands what the planner is up against. Such venues are often remembered and rebooked.
5. Tech adoption
RFP systems aren’t new, but the way they’re being used is changing. Some venue teams have routing set up, so no request sits untouched. Others use event-type templates to avoid rewriting proposals from scratch. A few have quoting tools embedded directly into their sourcing profiles.
These tools help planners compare offers more easily and give venues a framework for faster, more tailored responses. Ultimately, success depends on how well the teams behind the technology understand their client’s pace and priorities.
Conclusion
Venue Directory’s Top 50 Meeting Venue list doesn’t just tell a story about popularity. It highlights the venues that planners chose to work with again and again, across hundreds of enquiries, because they delivered when it mattered. These venues stayed prompt and helped planners move quickly. And it also puts a spotlight on the teams behind them; the ones who know what is important when someone’s trying to plan an event under pressure.
This recognition comes from real decisions driven by responsiveness, relationships and reliability. Congratulations to every venue in the Top 50 but more so to the teams behind them that made it happen.
About the author
Diana Tamboly is Field Marketing Manager, Europe for Cvent's Hospitality Cloud business in Europe. In her role, she's responsible for setting and delivering the strategic marketing direction for Venue Directory, a Cvent company.
