Desana News

Introducing Desana Events: Streamlined event space booking and management for global organizations

January 10, 2024

Today we’re launching Desana Events, a unified solution to book space for large company events on a global scale. 

Planning an employee engagement day or regional team get-together? Need the perfect space for a public product launch or client conference? Let us help you find the perfect event space to collaborate and connect.

Through the Desana platform customers can browse high-quality event spaces globally for up to 120 people and book the perfect third party venue for large scale company events. 

Desana already powers the complete hybrid workplace experience for global companies, and can now transform your team's event booking experience too.

Why book events through Desana?

Connection: Spaces that bring teams together

In the world of hybrid and remote work, the opportunity to collaborate, engage and connect through purposeful, real life connection is now more important than ever. The rise of distributed hiring has meant that it's essential for businesses to have access to high quality, large scale event space that doesn’t readily exist in current real estate portfolios.

Through our offering of global event spaces Desana Events makes it easy for employees to get together, whether for important announcements, bonding time, or to throw high-quality events for clients and their wider network, in unique and inspiring environments.

Ease: a single point of contact

Desana Events streamlines the procurement and management challenges of dealing with individual venues and offers a seamless booking experience in the same platform our customers use to book hot desks, meeting rooms and private offices globally. 

As well as support in finding the right event space, we minimize the paperwork and time associated with throwing large events. Each event booking will generate a single invoice and we handle all arrangements, including procuring the space and any additional services provided by the venue, such as cleaning, security, staff and catering. 

Data: Understanding use

As Real Estate portfolios become more varied, it's vital that businesses have both transparency on the use of space and the ability to analyze and examine this data. Desana Events offers immediate reporting on event booking, attendance and how people have used the space, integrated within the same dynamic dashboard that reports on wider desk and meeting room use. 

This means that businesses have full insight on how their people are using space, from a single desk booking through to a global event with hundreds of attendees.

Desana CEO and Co-Founder, Michael Cockburn, commented:

“In conversation with our customers, it became very apparent that although there was a strong demand for getting larger teams together on a more habitual basis, there were significant barriers around the volume and organization of vendor procurement, as well as challenging contractual and payment variables that made executing this behavior very difficult at scale. 
What Desana has made possible for companies is the ability to access all event space vendors through a single unified platform, procurement process, legal contract, and payment framework. This not only significantly simplifies the process, but enables companies to have more sight of the utilization data for event space booking - something that before was near impossible to productively measure.
We’re very excited to be able to bring event spaces onto the platform to continue to help our largest customers with these challenges at scale, and continue to help them deliver more efficient and human centric strategies for how they use space, moving away from the 9-5, 5 day a week model for good!”

This growing market demand for more purposeful use of space is a change that has long been anticipated by experts like JLL Consulting’s Global Managing Director, Iain Franklin, who shared:

“For some time at our consulting practice at JLL we have anticipated the convergence of Meetings, Incentives, Conferences, and Events teams, and the Corporate Real Estate teams within enterprises, given that both are in the business of bringing people together to maximise productivity. However slow this convergence has historically been, in the past 2 years we have noticed a considerable acceleration of this trend. 
Some of our larger global accounts have seen event space budgets go from the hundreds of thousands per year to millions, as event space budgets have begun supplementing a more lean and efficient real estate portfolio. 
Although this represents a significant increase in spend on events, on aggregate we see companies realise sometimes tens of millions in savings from only paying when the space is used, vs vacant leases on the books. We'd anticipate a real need for solutions that consolidate the procurement and management of all types of space to make this a more scalable and data driven behaviour”

If you're planning events in 2024 and would like to talk more about our new booking system then get in touch with the Desana Events team. All available spaces can be searched for live in the app, where you can also submit venue requests and talk to our concierge team directly. Find out more on how to book event space in our Help Centre.

Not on the Desana platform? Arrange a demo with our team here.