In an interview with TimesTech, Vishal Puri, Co-founder of Spalba, shared how their VR-enabled Digital Twins are redefining the event planning landscape. From accelerating bookings for top hotels like The Leela and The Oberoi to enabling AI-powered layouts and immersive planning, Spalba is driving efficiency and innovation for venues and planners across scales—making high-impact events more accessible, faster to plan, and easier to execute.
Read the full interview here:
TimesTech: Spalba’s VR-enabled Digital Twins have significantly changed how top hotels like The Leela and The Oberoi market their venues. Could you share how this technology is helping accelerate bookings and reduce dependency on physical site visits?
Vishal: Digital Twins are rapidly transforming the way venue sales are conducted, especially for forward-thinking hospitality brands. By replacing traditional site visits with VR-enabled walkthroughs, hotels are now offering planners a photorealistic, immersive experience that can be accessed directly from a phone or laptop. This shift has made the venue selection process significantly faster and more efficient.
Instead of waiting for clients to travel or coordinate multiple in-person meetings, planners can now explore spaces with full spatial accuracy, design layouts, and visualize event flow within minutes. This visual-first approach is helping properties accelerate their sales cycles, with some reporting conversion speeds that are 30 to 40 percent faster. In one instance, a partner hotel was able to close a major event for an automobile brand in under 2.5 hours—entirely through a virtual walkthrough. It’s a clear example of how removing friction from the buyer journey enables real-time decision-making and drives tangible business impact.
TimesTech: The Event Mockup Builder sounds like a game-changer for planners. How does this tool enhance the planning process, and what kind of feedback have you received from users regarding its real-time layout customization features?
Vishal: The Event Mockup Builder combines personalisation with efficiency at scale, setting a new industry standard, something most platforms in this space haven’t been able to pull off.
With Spalba, planners can design a layout specific to their event, whether that’s seating for 500 people, a floating stage, or breakout lounges for networking. They just drag, drop, and build their entire setup visually, in 2D or directly on the Digital Twin.
The feedback has been phenomenal. We’ve had planners call it “Canva for events”—which, to us, is the highest compliment. It’s intuitive, collaborative, and helps everyone stay aligned while also saving time and reducing last-minute coordination headaches with venue teams.
TimesTech: Spalba positions itself as an intelligent sales tool for hotels. Can you elaborate on how your platform integrates data and AI to help hotels boost banquet revenue and streamline venue management?
Vishal: Spalba is built to be more than just a showcase tool, it’s a sales engine for hotels. With TOURS by Spalba, hotel teams can create personalised virtual walkthroughs tailored to specific event types, highlighting only the most relevant venues, transitions, and guest flow. Whether it’s a wedding, MICE event, or corporate gala, this curated digital site visit ensures a seamless and engaging client experience.
Combined with our AI capabilities for layout generation and guest flow optimisation Spalba helps sales teams prioritise leads, reduce drop-offs, and close deals faster. The result? Smarter sales conversations and stronger banquet revenues.
TimesTech: With a network of over 11,000 venues, how does Spalba’s marketplace empower businesses to discover, compare, and book venues more efficiently than traditional sourcing methods?
Vishal: Traditional venue sourcing has long been slow, fragmented, and often exhausting.
Spalba aims to overhaul that experience by streamlining discovery and planning into a single, tech-enabled platform. With over 11,000 venues listed, planners gain access to a wide range of options that can be filtered by location, capacity, layout, and more.
Beyond discovery, the platform emphasises immersive planning. More than 250 properties have been fully digitalised using Spalba’s Digital Twin technology, allowing users to step inside venues virtually and plan events down to the smallest detail. Planners can also connect directly with hotel sales teams, compare multiple options side-by-side, and make faster decisions—without the need for back-and-forth emails or time-consuming site visits.
The platform functions like Google Maps meets Airbnb for event venues—but with a powerful planning engine layered on top.
TimesTech: From boutique events to large corporate experiences, how is Spalba making event planning more accessible and less resource-intensive for enterprises of varying scales?
Vishal: Spalba has set out to democratise high-quality event planning, whether it’s for a startup organising a 50-person offsite or a global enterprise hosting a 5,000-delegate MICE event. Recognising that the venue serves as the foundation of any successful experience, the platform aims to simplify what has traditionally been the most complex and time-consuming part of the planning process.
Through its Digital Twin technology, Spalba allows planners to explore venues in full detail, take accurate measurements, and create custom layouts—all without the need for physical site visits. This empowers teams of all sizes to make faster, smarter decisions, significantly reduce coordination efforts, and plan with confidence. By providing flexible, tech-enabled tools, Spalba enables enterprises to do more with less while still delivering impactful, memorable events.
TimesTech: You’ve both spoken passionately about disrupting the traditional event ecosystem. What’s next for Spalba in terms of technology innovation—are there new XR, AI, or automation features in the pipeline that we can expect in the near future?
Vishal: Spalba is entering its next phase of growth with a strong focus on advancing AI and automation to make event planning more intelligent and efficient. Key innovations on the horizon include:
- AI-Powered Layouts:
Automatically generate seating plans and guest flow designs based on event type, objectives, and venue specifications—helping planners save time while optimising space.
- Virtual Venue Commerce:
Hotels will soon be able to sell value-added services like décour, AV, and catering directly within their Digital Twin environments—creating new revenue opportunities and simplifying upselling.
These innovations will enhance efficiency, drive stronger sales, and transform the way events are planned and executed.
- Looking ahead, Spalba envisions:
- Digital Twins becoming the industry standard
- Event personalisation happens in real-time with smart suggestions
- Venue bookings are reduced to a few clicks—no back-and-forth, no ambiguity.
With expansion into new markets, Spalba aims to establish itself as the default operating system for venue sales and event planning worldwide.
