Cvent Passkey - Upcoming & Recent Releases

Upcoming Releases

• Room Categories

• Hotel Instruction Emails

• Support of the FTCs Pricing Transparency Rules

Recently Released

• Decoupling Billing Fields when Processing Rooming Lists

Room Categories

Release Date: October 22, 2025

We’re excited to announce the launch of Room Categories in Cvent Passkey, designed to simplify and enhance the group booking experience for both hotels and event organizers.

Hotels and event organizers have shared that the way guest room types are organized in hotel inventory systems doesn’t always align with what’s best for group attendees. This can make the booking process more complicated or require manual work from hotel staff.

With Room Categories, Cvent Passkey-licensed hotels can now create custom groupings of multiple room types—without changing how rooms are allocated within contracted room blocks. This new feature streamlines group room distribution, eliminates manual reconciliation for “run-of-house” bookings, and reduces confusion for attendees about the specific room type they’ve reserved.3

How Does It Work?

Hotels can set up rooms under an overarching category and establish a sell order. For citywide events, event organizers can use hotel-defined categories or create their own custom categories, grouping room types as needed. This preserves the integrity of the hotel’s Room Type Library while giving organizers flexibility in how rooms are presented to attendees.

This approach maintains the integrity of the hotel’s room inventory while giving organizers flexibility in how rooms are presented to attendees. The result is a more efficient booking process, with fewer options displayed to attendees and clearer expectations about room attributes.

What’s Next?

We are planning several enhancements to further expand Room Categories:

• Event organizers will soon be able to create their own Room Categories at the event level, including one or more room types from a licensed hotel’s Room Type Library.

• We will expand support for booking Room Categories to additional Passkey reservation channels, including Call Center, Room List Manager, and the Multi-Room Booking Tool.

• An upcoming enhancement will allow management of room images at the Room Category level, helping ensure that images accurately represent the grouped room types and set the right expectations for guests.

Hotel Instruction Emails

Release Date: October 22, 2025

We’re excited to introduce Hotel Instruction Emails—a new feature designed to support hotels when they are invited to participate in an organizer’s Passkey event. Whether or not a hotel uses Passkey for its own events, when invited to join a Passkey Citywide event, the hotel will leverage the organizer’s Passkey license.

Hotel Instruction Emails provide clear, step-by-step guidance on how to interact with Passkey for each specific event, helping hotels deliver reservations smoothly to their property management system (PMS). These tailored instructions ensure hotel teams know exactly what actions to take, reducing manual effort and minimizing confusion.

With this update, hotels will receive timely communications with all the necessary details, making it easier to collaborate with event organizers and ensure a seamless experience for guests and staff.

Support of the FTCs Pricing Transparency Rules

Release Date: October 29, 2025

Overview

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has enacted new regulations requiring short-term lodging businesses—including hotels and vacation rentals—to clearly disclose all fees and charges upfront. This ensures customers know the exact amount they will pay before completing a booking.

To align with these regulations and enhance clarity for attendees, we are introducing Pricing Transparency Phase 2 on the attendee booking site.

What’s New

• Taxes configured at the event level will now be displayed based on their setup:

  • Taxes marked as included will appear under “Included Taxes.”

  • Taxes marked as excluded will appear under “Additional Taxes.”

• Attendees will see a detailed breakdown of charges throughout the booking process, including:

  • Base Room Rate

  • Taxes

  • Included Taxes

  • Excluded (Additional) Taxes

  • Grand Total

• This breakdown is visible from the Room Selection page (Price Details) through to the Reservation Summary.

Benefits

• Compliance: Meets FTC and California transparency requirements.

• Clarity: Attendees can easily understand the composition of their booking cost.

• Trust: Builds confidence by eliminating hidden charges and surprises at checkout.

Decoupling Billing Fields when Processing Rooming Lists

Release Date: October 16, 2025

We’re excited to announce an update to Passkey’s Room List Manager that gives you more flexibility when managing reservations. You can now edit individual billing fields—such as address, city, or phone number—without needing to update credit card information at the same time. This enhancement streamlines the process of correcting billing details, especially when a reservation is pending or unprocessed due to billing errors.

Earlier this year, we standardized credit card forms across Passkey to provide a more consistent and secure experience, in line with the latest PCI guidelines. With this latest update, you can make field-level changes to the following billing information on a reservation:

• Name

• Address 1

• Address 2

• City

• State

• Postal Code

• Country

• Phone

Looking ahead, we’re working on enabling bulk edits to multiple reservations, allowing you to update card information independently from billing information.