How Typecast Meetings + Events Saves 25-30 Hours Per RFP and Delivers Best-in-Class Client Presentations with Hopskip

Background

Typecast Meetings + Events is a boutique corporate event management company built on a simple but demanding promise: exceptional service, anywhere in the world. Founded by Kristen Collins, Typecast specializes in hotel sourcing and end-to-end event management for corporate clients who expect the best -- polished deliverables, strategic recommendations, and a partner who treats their events with the same care they would.

As an independent planner managing roughly 10 sourcing engagements per year, Kristen operates without the safety net of a large agency infrastructure. Every tool she uses, every process she runs, and every deliverable she produces reflects directly on her reputation. There's no team to absorb the inefficiency and no brand name to hide behind. The work speaks for itself.

Which made her pre-Hopskip process all the more unsustainable.

The Challenge: Proposals as Attachments, Summaries in Airtable, and a Process She Describes as Torture

Before Hopskip, Kristen's hotel sourcing workflow was a study in fragmentation. Leads went out via email to GSO and NSO contacts. Proposals came back in every format imaginable: PDFs, e-proposals, buried email threads. Photos, capacity charts, and fact sheets lived in folders. Follow-ups happened over email and phone, often multiple times per property just to fill in missing details.

Then came the client-facing work. After gathering and organizing all of that, Kristen had to prepare an extensive comparison summary in Airtable and embed it onto a private webpage for each client. Every time something changed, the document had to be updated. Every new proposal meant more formatting, more reformatting, and more time.

She had also tried Cvent, which she found cumbersome and limiting in terms of the volume of RFPs she could send as an independent planner. The pricing wasn't built for a solo operator, and the interface didn't match the lean, fast workflow she needed.

The result was a sourcing process that was technically functional but brutally inefficient. Time that should have gone toward strategy and client relationships was being swallowed by administrative busywork. And as a business owner, every hour lost to process is an hour not spent growing the business.

"Getting proposal after proposal from hotels as attachments, storing pics and fact sheets in folders, following up numerous times because proposals were missing key details, and then preparing a professional comparison document was tedious, time consuming and clunky. In a word: torture."

- Kristen Collins, Founder, Typecast Meetings + Events

The Solution: Polished Enough for Enterprise, Priced Right for an Independent Planner

Kristen first encountered Hopskip at an IMEX booth a couple of years ago. She set up a discovery call with the team and was immediately struck by the sophistication of the platform and its intuitive ease of use. As an independent planner, she hadn't expected to find something so polished at a price point that actually made sense for her business.

She onboarded and saw results within minutes.

The transformation started with the RFP process itself. Instead of sending leads through email and managing a fragmented inbox of responses, Kristen could now send a single RFP to multiple hotels and receive standardized, comparable proposals back in one centralized place. No more chasing missing details. No more consolidating attachments from a dozen different sources.

The feature that changed her client deliverables entirely was Hopskip's comparison reports and Decision Deck. With the click of a button, Kristen could generate a polished, professional PowerPoint proposal comparison ready to share with clients -- the kind of document that previously took hours to build manually. Her clients, who expect the absolute best, now receive a cleaner, more thoughtful presentation than ever before.

The cost savings tracking feature gave Kristen another powerful tool: the ability to quantify the value she delivers to clients in concrete terms, not just impressions. And when a hotel she knew wasn't already in Hopskip's database, it was added within minutes by the support team -- a responsiveness that reinforced her confidence in the platform from day one.

The Results

25-30 Hours Saved Per RFP

The single most impactful result of switching to Hopskip was time. Kristen estimates she saves 25 to 30 hours per RFP, a figure that captures everything from research and outreach to proposal organization and client deliverable creation. Across a full year of sourcing engagements, that represents hundreds of hours returned to the business -- time that now goes toward client relationships, new business development, and the creative strategic work that defines Typecast's value.

For an independent planner operating without a support team, that kind of efficiency gain isn't incremental. It's transformational.

Stronger GSO and NSO Relationships

An unexpected benefit of Hopskip was the positive impact on Kristen's industry relationships. By streamlining how she communicates with her GSO and NSO contacts and making the RFP process cleaner and more professional on both sides, she's strengthened the partnerships that are central to her sourcing network. Better process means better relationships -- and better relationships mean better results for clients.

Immediate Time to Value

Unlike platforms that require weeks of onboarding before delivering meaningful results, Hopskip delivered for Kristen within minutes of her first use. There was no steep learning curve, no lengthy implementation, and no period of adjustment. The platform was intuitive enough to use immediately and powerful enough to make an impact right away.

For a business owner who can't afford downtime, that matters enormously.

Why Typecast Chose Hopskip Over Cvent and Manual Workflows

The decision came down to three things: affordability, usability, and fit.

Cvent was too expensive and too limiting for an independent operator. Airtable-based workflows were functional but time-consuming and unprofessional as client deliverables. Hopskip was the first platform that combined the sophistication Kristen's clients deserved with a price point and interface designed for the way she actually works.

The product's continuous improvement also stood out. Kristen and a colleague maintain a running wish list of enhancements, and they've repeatedly found that the features they want are already on Hopskip's roadmap. That kind of alignment between user feedback and product vision signals a team that genuinely listens -- and for a business owner who depends on her tools, that trust is invaluable.

"Hopskip has been an absolute game changer for me. It allows me to provide best-in-class service to my clients while taking a huge burden of tedious work and mental load off of me. As a business owner, it's one of the best investments I've ever made."

Deliver Better. Work Smarter. Start Free Today.

Kristen's story is one that independent planners and boutique agencies across the industry will recognize immediately. The manual sourcing process she left behind is still the reality for thousands of planners -- and it doesn't have to be.

Hopskip was built for planners who expect more from their tools: more efficiency, more polish, and more time to focus on the work that actually moves the needle.

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.