How Event Highlights Cut RFP Time by 80% and Grew Their Client Base with Hopskip

Background

Event Highlights is a boutique event sourcing and production firm led by Amy Spaulding, CMP. As President, Amy oversees the full sourcing and hotel contracting process for her clients: from identifying the right properties and sending RFPs, to comparing proposals, negotiating contracts, and delivering a recommendation her clients can trust.

It's a high-responsibility role that demands precision, speed, and deep industry knowledge. Amy's clients aren't just hiring her to find a hotel. They're hiring her to find the right hotel efficiently, professionally, and within budget, so they can focus on running their business.

In a world where every hour billed to a client is scrutinized and every sourcing cycle competes with a dozen others on the calendar, the process either scales with you or holds you back. For Amy and her team, the old way of working had quietly become the latter.

The Challenge: Too Many Tabs, Too Many Hours, No Central Home Base

Before Hopskip, Amy's sourcing process was entirely manual and deeply fragmented. Finding hotels meant researching areas online, mapping proximity to key landmarks by hand, and then reaching out to each property individually to request a proposal. CVBs and Global Sales contacts helped fill in the gaps, but the legwork was still largely on Amy's team.

There was no central platform to organize what came back. Proposals arrived through different channels, lived in different places, and had to be compiled and compared manually. Every RFP cycle meant starting the same time-consuming process from scratch.

The hidden cost of all this was the hours billed to clients. Because sourcing was so labor-intensive, the time it took to do it well showed up directly on client invoices, creating tension between doing thorough work and delivering cost-effective service.

And beyond the client relationship, there was the opportunity cost. Every hour spent researching hotel locations and chasing proposals was an hour not spent serving existing clients better or onboarding new ones. The process wasn't just inefficient. It was actively limiting the growth of the business.

"Before Hopskip, I was spending so much time just trying to find and organize hotels. Now I can search, filter, send, and manage everything in one place, and my clients are getting better service for less. It's completely changed how I work."

- Amy Spaulding, CMP, President, Event Highlights

The Solution: One Platform That Does What Used to Take an Entire Process

Hopskip gave Amy something she didn't have before: a single, purpose-built platform that handled every stage of the hotel sourcing process in one place.

The impact started with search. Hopskip's database of 150,000+ hotels meant Amy could instantly filter properties based on her client's specific requirements, including location, capacity, and amenities, without bouncing between websites and spreadsheets. But the feature that became her favorite was the radius search tool: the ability to draw a circle on a map and instantly identify every qualifying hotel within a specific distance from a venue, landmark, or city center. What used to take hours of manual research now took seconds.

From there, sending RFPs to multiple hotels simultaneously and receiving standardized, comparable proposals back in a centralized dashboard replaced the fragmented, email-heavy process Amy had relied on for years. Every proposal in one place. Every status visible at a glance. No more chasing, no more compiling, no more chaos.

Hopskip's customer support made the transition even smoother. Amy described the team as friendly, approachable, and instantly responsive, a meaningful contrast to the slow, inconsistent support she'd experienced with other platforms.

“HopSkip is a great tool for smaller businesses that can’t afford the big players in the space, and I don’t think we are missing out on anything.”

The Results

80% Reduction in RFP Time Per Event

The headline result says it all. By centralizing every stage of the sourcing process, including research, outreach, proposal collection, and organization, Hopskip reduced the time Amy spent on each RFP by 80%. Tasks that previously consumed full days were compressed into hours. Decisions that required extensive manual comparison could now be made quickly from a single, organized view.

For a boutique firm where time is the most valuable resource, an 80% reduction in sourcing time isn't just an efficiency win. It's a fundamental shift in what's possible.

"Hopskip has drastically reduced the time the RFP process takes, saving our clients money.

Lower Billable Hours Without Lowering Quality

One of the most client-friendly outcomes of Event Highlights' move to Hopskip was the direct reduction in billable hours. Because sourcing was faster and more efficient, clients were charged less for the same, often better, level of service. That transparency and cost-consciousness deepened client trust, reinforced Event Highlights' reputation for delivering value, and made Amy's firm an even easier choice to recommend.

In an industry where relationships are everything, being the planner who saves your clients money without cutting corners is a powerful differentiator.

Increased Capacity to Grow the Business

With the time freed up by Hopskip, Amy gained the capacity to do something she hadn't been able to before: take on new clients without stretching her team thin or compromising the quality of service delivered to existing ones. The growth wasn't forced or reactive. It was built on a foundation of operational efficiency that could actually support it.

New clients came in. Standards stayed high. Revenue grew. And Event Highlights cemented its reputation as a reliable, high-caliber sourcing partner in the meeting and event industry.

Why Event Highlights Chose Hopskip

For a solo operator and boutique firm, the right platform needs to work quickly, require minimal training, and deliver immediate value. There's no IT team to manage an implementation and no time to spend weeks onboarding a complicated system.

Hopskip was designed exactly for planners like Amy: intuitive from day one, powerful enough to handle a full client portfolio, and built exclusively for hotel sourcing rather than buried inside a bloated event management suite. The radius search tool, centralized RFP dashboard, and responsive customer support made it the obvious choice for a planner who needed results, not complexity.

Source Smarter. Bill Less. Grow Faster. Start Free Today.

Amy's story resonates with independent planners and boutique agencies across the industry. When your sourcing process is holding you back, everything suffers: your clients, your capacity, and your bottom line.

Hopskip was built to fix that. Thousands of planners are already using it to source hotels faster, deliver better client experiences, and grow their businesses without burning out.

Ready to Ditch the Chaos?

See what Hopskip can do for your event sourcing process. Start for free today or book a demo and discover why teams like Meeting Encore are never going back to Excel.