Every morning, Yvonne Sahlström walked into the office and opened her email to find overnight bookings waiting for her. No one had processed them. No staff were in the building after 5 pm. But the requests had arrived anyway — and now she had to figure out which room, which customer, and which day, across a tangle of Google Calendar events, notebook pages, and Excel rows.

That was before MeetingPackage.

Yvonne is the Assistant Head of Convention Sales at Virtatalo, a convention and meeting venue in Vantaa, Finland. When she joined the team, they were running their entire Groups, Meetings & Events sales operation on general-purpose tools that were never built for the job.

"We used Google Calendar, notebooks, Excel — general tools to manage our sales," she says. "Once we started using MeetingPackage, it helped systemise the whole sales process and consolidated it into a single platform."

From scattered to streamlined

The shift was not just about software. It was about visibility.

Before MeetingPackage, knowing what was happening on any given day required checking multiple places, hoping nothing had slipped through the cracks. Now, with three team members on the platform, the answer is a single glance at the calendar.

"Everyone knows what's happening tomorrow, next week, and who the customer is — just by looking at the calendar," Yvonne says.

Virtatalo has enough meeting rooms that managing them without a proper system would quickly become unworkable. The calendar is now the backbone of their sales operation — not just for tracking availability, but for holding customer records too. When a returning customer calls, their details are already there.

"I like that it remembers a customer who has already made a booking. The information is already there when I start typing the name. I don't have to write it again."

That kind of small efficiency adds up quickly when you are handling a steady flow of enquiries, many of them by phone.

Bookings that don't wait for business hours

One of the clearest signs that Virtatalo's setup is working: one in three of their bookings now comes in outside office hours.

For companies renting office space in the same building, the need to book a meeting room often doesn't follow a 9-to-5 schedule. With instant booking enabled for one of their meeting rooms, customers can confirm without picking up the phone — even when the lead time is as short as two hours.

"The booking window can be as short as two hours at times," Yvonne notes. "We have a lot of customers who just book the meeting room and the lead time is quite short — that's why we have the instant booking functionality on."

It is not the dominant part of their business model, and Yvonne is candid about that. The catering side of the operation needs more lead time than instant bookings typically allow. But for the right customer — and for capturing revenue that would otherwise wait until morning — it works exactly as it should.

86% of bookings confirmed

A booking confirmation rate of 86% is not accidental. It reflects a sales process that moves quickly and does not lose enquiries in the noise.

When Yvonne arrives in the morning, the overnight bookings are already in the system — not just in her inbox. The team can respond, confirm, and plan without the friction of reconciling information across tools.

"If anybody is inputting anything into the calendar after office hours, it's me," she says, with the kind of honesty that makes the number make sense. "I'm often here at 9 pm, checking email, managing some bookings."

The platform does not eliminate the work. It just makes sure the work is always in one place.

Virtatalo's story is a straightforward one: they had a real problem, they found a purpose-built solution, and it works. The tools they used before were not bad -- they were just not built for Groups, Meetings & Events. The difference, it turns out, is significant.

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