Tagvenue Made Booking a Venue Feel Like Booking a Flight

The trouble with a wedding, a work conference or a fortieth birthday is rarely the cake or the guest list. It is the room. For most of the internet age, booking a physical space for a group of people meant phone tag, emailed PDFs, awkward "so, what's your budget?" conversations and at least one Tuesday-afternoon site visit. You could book a hotel bed in three taps, but you could not book the ballroom next door without a small campaign of admin.

Maksims Kondratjuks noticed this the hard way, first while organising a conference and then while planning his own wedding. He mentioned it to his friend Artur Stepaniak, whom he had met at Lancaster University. They arrived at the same plain observation.

"Immediately, we both realised that there were loads of websites for booking accommodation, but none for booking venues."Artur Stepaniak, co-founder

In March 2015 the two - neither with prior business experience, Kondratjuks arriving from a stint at the London Stock Exchange - launched Tagvenue. The first booking was not glamorous: a children's birthday party with a hired entertainer. But it came without a penny of advertising, and that told them something. "Despite no advertising, customers were finding us on their own, so we knew we were onto something big," Kondratjuks later recalled.

What Tagvenue actually does

Strip away the categories and Tagvenue is a search engine for places you can hire. A planner types in a city, a headcount and an occasion; the site returns real venues with real, upfront prices, and lets them fire a single enquiry to several at once - closer to comparing flights than cold-calling banquet managers. Econsultancy reached for the obvious shorthand and called it "the Airbnb of venues," and the label has stuck.

The inventory is broader than the phrase "event space" suggests. Tagvenue lists more than 40 venue types across six markets - the UK, United States, Canada, Australia, Singapore and Ireland. Alongside the predictable meeting rooms, restaurants and hotel function suites sit the ones that make the catalogue fun to browse: canal boats, art galleries, converted churches, underground vaults, film-shoot studios. If a space can hold a crowd and wants the business, it can be on the list.

Who it is for, and the problem it removes

There are two customers, and the trick has always been serving both without picking a favourite. On one side are the people planning something: corporate teams booking conferences and away-days, agencies, couples chasing a reception, and private hosts who just want a room for Saturday. Roughly 700,000 event organisers use the platform in a given month. On the other side are the venue owners and managers - the restaurant with a private room going empty on weeknights, the studio that could earn more if the right planners knew it existed.

The problem Tagvenue removes is friction, and specifically the most uncomfortable moment in the whole process: the pricing conversation. Because the site shows rates built on real booking data before anyone picks up the phone, the "what can you afford?" dance mostly disappears. Every listing is checked by hand, and more than 100,000 verified reviews give the numbers a second opinion. On Reviews.io the platform sits at 4.73 out of 5 from over 3,600 ratings.

Free for the planner. Commission only when a venue says yes. The incentives point the same direction as the customer.

How the money works

Tagvenue costs event planners nothing - no booking fees, no admin charges, no membership. Venues list for free too. The company earns a commission, generally in the region of 10-15% depending on the event type and country, and only when a booking is actually confirmed. Nobody pays for a maybe.

It is an unfashionably clean model, and it explains a fact that surprises people: Tagvenue has no disclosed funding rounds. A marketplace operating in six countries, with roughly 92 employees, built on commissions rather than capital. In a decade of venture-backed marketplaces burning cash to buy growth, that is the detail worth pausing on.

Ten years, in six bars

The founders' 2022 letter captured a smaller company mid-climb: about 11,000 venues, 300,000 monthly visitors, 30,000 events a year and a team just over 80. The numbers since have roughly doubled on most lines, which is what steady compounding looks like when nobody is torching a balance sheet to hit a quarterly target.

What makes it different

The most instructive decision Tagvenue made was one it did not make. It never copied Airbnb's instant-booking mechanic. Venues are messier than spare bedrooms - catering minimums, layout questions, licensing, dates that shift - so the platform kept an enquiry model instead of pretending a room could be reserved like a hotel. Copying the template but knowing where to break it is the whole game.

Its quiet growth engine is a badge. The Supervenue programme rewards venues that respond quickly and get booked often, pushing the most reliable spaces up the results. It turns a supplier network into a status game: the venues compete to be responsive, and planners get answers faster. Everybody moves quicker, and Tagvenue barely has to lift a finger.

Set against rivals - Peerspace and Splacer in the US, VenueScanner and Hire Space in the UK, EventUp elsewhere - Tagvenue's edge is less a single feature than a posture: manual verification, transparent pricing, and a genuine two-sided balance. It leads the market in the UK, Australia and Singapore.

The 2025 turn: from marketplace to software

In 2025 the company stopped being only a marketplace. Tagvenue Pro, an AI-powered venue-management platform with a lead analytics tool called LeadHub, gives venue managers software to handle enquiries, track leads and grow bookings. The logic is the kind other founders can lift wholesale: once you own the demand, sell the venues the tools to handle it. A commission business gains a subscription business, sitting on top of the audience it already built.

"Tagvenue is yours as much as it is ours, and we're building it together."Co-founders' letter, 2022

Where it fits

Events are a large, stubbornly offline industry, and the part Tagvenue occupies - matching a planner to a space - was until recently run on relationships, spreadsheets and agents' phone books. Tagvenue's bet is that this discovery layer belongs on the internet, priced and reviewed like everything else we book. Ten years in, with an AI product bolted on and a business that pays for itself, that bet looks less like a gamble and more like a habit the market has quietly adopted.

Whether it stays independent, expands into more markets or leans harder into software, the founding observation still holds. There were sites for booking almost everything, and none for booking venues. Tagvenue built the missing one, and then made a living from it without asking anyone for a cheque.