INTRODUCTION
Cartagena, Colombia, is known for its colonial walled city and Caribbean coastline. Today, it is also rapidly emerging as a meetings and incentives hotspot. General Manager Alejandro Manfredonio sees this shift firsthand at the InterContinental Cartagena de Indias, where 35–40% of lodging revenue now comes from groups.
Despite strong demand, Cartagena remains absent from many rankings of the top Latin American meeting destinations, which are dominated by cities in Mexico, Costa Rica, the Bahamas, and Aruba. For Alejandro, that gap represents both a challenge and an opportunity: “We can have our fair share. But for that, we need to adopt technology” to reach international buyers where they actually source events—online.
The InterContinental Cartagena has learned to attract more qualified international group leads through the Cvent Supplier Network (CSN), streamline room block management for its booming destination weddings and social events using Cvent Passkey, and use data and automation to increase efficiency and stay competitive in an emerging group business market.
CHALLENGE
Cartagena offers what many planners say they want today: immersive experiences, compact logistics, and strong hotel and convention infrastructure. The city can host events of up to 7,000 people across three convention centers, plus a robust network of hotels and non-traditional venues in the historic center.
The InterContinental Cartagena operates 285 rooms and can host events for up to 700 attendees. However, global visibility lagged behind the destination’s potential. Alejandro cites a Skift article showing millions of dollars in meetings business flowing into Latin America and the Caribbean in 2024—without Cartagena even appearing among the top destinations. To change that, he knew his hotel and the broader destination needed to meet international planners where they source.
If we want to reach those qualified buyers, we also need to learn and use the tools where these connections are being made.
Before adopting Cvent, InterContinental Cartagena relied on more manual, less “technological” channels to capture group business and manage room blocks. That created limited visibility with international planners who primarily source through digital platforms. For the internal convention services and reservations teams, time-consuming processes for managing rooming lists in Google Sheets or Excel consumed much of their working hours. Fragmented data made it difficult to handle the complexity of social and destination weddings, where guests have diverse arrival/departure patterns and upgrade preferences.
As global planners increasingly use online venue directories, interactive diagrams, and AI search to shortlist properties, Alejandro recognized a risk for the property. The hotel needed a technology partner that could both increase demand and modernize operations—without sacrificing the human connection that defines their brand.
If the quotation, proposal, and operation process, and how we use technological tools, don’t align with the expectations of these meeting planners, the equation falls apart. This could cause us to lose competitiveness to other destinations that might be a bit more professionalized in that aspect.
SOLUTION
Cvent Supplier Network advertising and Cvent Passkey for end-to-end group success
Alejandro turned to Cvent to tackle both attracting more qualified leads and managing them efficiently.
Tools like [Cvent’s] Diamond Plus and Two Diamond, which we also have as a hotel, are crucial. This helps the hotel gain greater visibility and allows us to reach those accounts that are important to us, because we know we can achieve a higher share, especially in the U.S. corporate market.
Passkey addresses these complexities by:
- Enabling personalized, branded booking websites for each group or wedding
- Allowing guests to self-select arrival and departure dates, room types, and add-ons
- Automatically syncing reservations to the hotel’s PMS, eliminating manual uploads, ensuring data accuracy, and minimizing manual errors.
- Supporting upsell offers such as premium room categories, InterContinental Club access, and value-add packages
- Allowing the planning of VIP packages and room lists to be self-managed by guests reduces the convention services team’s workload by three to four hours per event.
We tell the couple that we can create a personalized landing page highlighting the aspects that are important to them. This way, each person makes their own reservation, and we have the peace of mind that all self-management ends up in our system. Cvent has the tools for us to be more efficient and have more time to fulfill our purpose of connecting with people.
RESULTS
Higher‑quality leads, incremental revenue, and time back to focus on guests
With a more visible presence on the Cvent Supplier Network through CSN advertising, InterContinental Cartagena has transformed its group sales pipeline, booking more than $120,000 in revenue from those leads in the first half of 2025. “Every dollar we invest in Cvent is extraordinarily recovered,” said Alejandro. By the end of 2025, the hotel had exceeded $450,000 in event revenue sourced through the Cvent Supplier Network.
The InterContinental Cartagena prioritizes responding to RFPs completely and efficiently, allowing them to build stronger relationships with valuable event professionals and secure more group business for the property. In 2025, they maintained a response rate of 96% and an average response time of three hours, significantly ahead of the four-day benchmark many planners expect. 77% of the RFPs they received were from planners who had not sourced the hotel before, reinforcing Alejandro’s belief that the quality and fit of Cvent-sourced leads justify continued investment.
By offloading administrative work to Cvent’s technology, his team can focus on what sets Cartagena apart: high-touch, human-centered hospitality and strong collaboration with planners and fellow hoteliers to grow the overall meetings market.
From my perspective, there are two ROIs. The first ROI is evidently from prospecting and how the sales pipeline is fed. The second is the efficiency in the time of typical operational processes, which will allow your team to connect more with clients or dedicate more time to other tasks that will benefit the operation.
BEST PRACTICES
Alejandro views Cvent not just as a platform, but as a strategic partner in advancing both his hotel and the broader destination. He sees technology as essential to keeping pace with an industry where “if the context is moving at a certain speed and you are not moving at the same speed, you will be left behind.” Because of this commitment, he plans to work even more closely with his team and properties across the city to leverage Passkey upsell capabilities, CSN advertising, and emerging AI tools to further increase revenue and efficiency.
As global demand for in-person events continues to rise and planners lean more heavily on technology-powered sourcing, hotels that combine strong digital presence with efficient, guest-centric operations will stand out. InterContinental Cartagena de Indias shows how a hotel—and a destination—can use Cvent to claim its place on that global stage.
For peers across Latin America, his message is:
- Invest in digital visibility where planners actually source.
- Modernize proposals and housing management with tools like Cvent Passkey and RFP workflows.
- Treat technology spend as an investment, not an expense—one that can be recovered multiple times over when used strategically.
Creating national visibility for a resort
