We emailed 662 venues real event briefs — real dates, real guest counts, real budgets. The addresses printed on venue websites as info@ or events@ bounced 31.6% of the time. The mailboxes that had a property code or a person behind them bounced 12.2%. Same briefs, same sending domain, same week. The only variable was the shape of the address the venue chose to publish.

If you run a venue, that is a two-and-a-half-times difference in whether a paying inquiry reaches a human, and it is decided by one line on your contact page.

The dataset

Every inquiry VenueKonnex sends starts as a planner’s actual brief. Across 81 briefs, 662 venues had a published email address we could write to. We sorted each address into three buckets by the part before the @ sign — no judgment calls, just a pattern rule:

• Bare role alias — the local part is only a job word. info@, events@, sales@, catering@, reservations@.
• Qualified alias — a job word plus a property or brand code, the pattern big hotel groups use to route mail to one specific property’s event desk.
• Owned mailbox — no job word at all. A person’s name, or the venue’s own name, on the venue’s own domain.

The bare role alias is the most common format on venue contact pages in our sample — 342 of 662, more than half — and it is the worst performer on both measures that matter. It loses a third of its mail outright, and of the mail that does arrive, it answers least often.

Read the reply column net of bounces and the gap narrows but does not close: among emails that actually landed, bare aliases answered 29.9% of the time, property-coded desks 41.5%. The alias problem is not only delivery. It is also that nobody owns the room.

Three ways an info@ address dies

We keep the bounce reason on every failed send. They fall into three groups, and none of them are exotic.

1. The mailbox was retired and the page wasn’t. Hard bounces reading “address not found” against domains that resolve fine and websites that load fine. Someone closed the mailbox; nobody edited the contact page.

2. The brand changed and the alias didn’t follow. One French Quarter hotel had rebranded; the events alias still printed on the page belonged to the old flag and rejected our brief outright. Another venue published a dedicated private-events domain that no longer resolves at all — the working site lives on the parent domain, one hop away, and every inquiry sent to the printed address vanishes.

3. The alias is a distribution list with permissions on it. Restricted internal groups reject outside senders in seconds. We have hard bounces timestamped 12 seconds after send — not a spam filter, a permissions setting. To a planner, this is indistinguishable from you being closed.

One search shows the concentration. A planner came to us wanting a Bourbon Street balcony for Fat Tuesday 2027 — 12 guests, $3,000, a date fixed almost three years out. Eighteen New Orleans venues had a published address. Fifteen of those were bare role aliases, and ten of the fifteen bounced. The three venues with a name on the mailbox all answered. Two of them said no, which is a real answer a planner can act on. Ten venues never knew the brief existed.

The honest counterexample

A bare alias is not automatically broken. Wilson Creek Winery in Temecula publishes a plain weddings alias and answered a 180-guest Inland Empire reception brief without a nudge. Plenty of info@ mailboxes are read by a real person every morning. The format is not a curse.

But it is an unhedged bet. A bare alias works when someone is assigned to it and fails silently when that stops being true — and the failure is invisible from the inside. Nobody at a venue ever finds out about the inquiry that bounced. The revenue just never shows up, and the quarter looks like soft demand.

What the mailboxes with names on them did

The pattern is consistent across markets and price points.

Orlando Celebration Gardens publishes a first-name mailbox on its own domain. Our brief landed May 23, went quiet, took one day-three nudge, and the owner answered May 27 — and that conversation produced a live listing.

21 Restaurant in Bacolod City uses the venue’s own name as the mailbox. Brief sent April 15, substantive reply April 17 — under 48 hours, from a secondary market, across a 15-hour time difference.

Seda Capitol Central, in the same city, routes through a property-scoped address on the hotel group’s domain — the qualified pattern. It answered the same brief within the week. Hyatt Regency Huntington Beach uses a property-coded events desk on the chain domain and replied to a 400-guest holiday brief in four days.

That last pair is the useful finding for anyone who thinks this is a small-venue problem. The property-coded chain desks are the best-performing bucket in the whole dataset — 35.4% reply, 14.6% bounce. Big operators already solved this. They stopped publishing one corporate events@ and gave every property its own routed mailbox. The result is a desk that knows which building you are asking about before it opens the message.

The fastest single reply we have on record came from a university arena where a named individual’s mailbox was published: a follow-up sent at 4:51 PM got an answer at 5:06 PM. Fifteen minutes. That venue did not have better staff than the ten that bounced in New Orleans. It had a reachable one.

Four changes, none of which cost anything

1. Send yourself a test from an outside address. Not from your own domain — from a personal account on a different provider. Half the failures in this dataset would surface in 60 seconds this way. Do it quarterly.
2. Put a name on the mailbox. First name at your domain is enough. If you must keep a role alias for continuity, publish the named mailbox first and the alias as the fallback, not the reverse.
3. If you’re a group or a chain, scope it to the property. The 35.4% reply bucket is built entirely on this. One mailbox per building, not one per brand.
4. Check the address after any rebrand, domain change, or staff departure. Every one of the brand-mismatch bounces we logged was a venue that changed something and left the contact page alone. This is the single highest-yield audit on your site.

An event inquiry is the highest-intent message your venue receives. It arrives with a date, a headcount and a budget already attached. Losing a third of them to a mailbox setting is the cheapest problem you will ever fix.

FAQ

Is info@ really worse than a personal address? In our data, yes — 31.6% bounce versus 11.2%, and a lower reply rate even after bounces are excluded. The format itself isn’t the cause; it’s that role aliases outlive the person who was watching them.

We use a shared inbox so inquiries don’t get lost when someone’s out. Should we stop? No. Keep the shared inbox, publish a named mailbox that forwards into it. You keep the continuity and lose the deliverability penalty.

How would we know if our address is bouncing? You wouldn’t — that’s the problem. Bounce notices go to the sender, not to you. Only an outside test tells you.

How fast do venues that do reply actually reply? Across 465 briefed venues, about 7 in 10 replies land within 24 hours. The full reply-speed breakdown is here.

What if we have no events email at all? That’s a bigger hole. 314 of 897 venues we briefed had no email address published anywhere, and they were 3x less likely to get the booking. Planners frequently ask for a specific venue by name and still can’t reach it.

Get the briefs, free

VenueKonnex sends venues real planner briefs — date, headcount, budget, format — at no cost to list and no charge until a booking is confirmed. If your venue is already on the site, claim it and tell us where the inquiries should land. If it isn’t, add it.

Tell us where to send your briefs →

Planning an event instead? Start with the 2026 Event Venue Booking & Cost Guide for real per-hour and per-event ranges, or browse live rooms like The ‘Quin House in Boston. We reach the venues so you don’t have to find out which addresses are dead.