No. Hiver has no native, purpose-built integration with Collins, no venue booking system appears in Hiver's app library, and Collins is not on Zapier, so there is no low-code bridge either. Hiver turns Gmail into a helpdesk, so your bookings@ address stays where it is and gains assignment, notes and SLA tracking. Collins is the venue-management and booking software behind DesignMyNight, used to run large-party enquiries, deposits, pre-orders and area bookings. Those are the enquiries worth the most, and Hiver cannot touch one of them.
The short answer
Hiver can receive a Collins enquiry in your shared Gmail inbox and make it accountable. It cannot do anything with it in Collins. Holding a room, building a package, taking a deposit, attaching a pre-order: all of that still happens by hand, in Collins, by a person.
Hiver + Collins | |
|---|---|
Native integration | None |
Best available workaround | A custom build on Hiver's API and the Collins API |
What the workaround still can't do | Check space availability, hold a room, build or quote a package, take a deposit, attach a pre-order |
Hiver offers a Zapier connector and its own API, so its half is ready. Collins is not on Zapier, connecting outward through its own API to point-of-sale, payment and marketing systems instead. So a custom build is the only route, and the constraint sits on the booking-system side.
What actually happens to a booking enquiry
Give Hiver full credit first. If your venues run on Google Workspace and enquiries arrive at a shared Gmail address, Hiver is the lowest-friction improvement available: no migration, no new interface, and immediate assignment, internal notes, SLA rules and reporting on that mailbox. Events teams benefit more than most, because a private-hire thread passes between several people over weeks and Hiver makes ownership unambiguous.
Here is the real journey of one enquiry once you have done that.
A family emails
bookings@on a Tuesday asking about a funeral reception for around 50 on the Friday of the following week. They need a private room, a simple buffet, and to know quickly whether it is possible at all. The message lands in Gmail and Hiver assigns it with a high-priority label.An agent opens it in Gmail and reads it.
The agent opens Collins in another tab, because Hiver cannot see the space diary.
They check whether the private room is free that Friday afternoon, what the minimum spend would be at short notice, which buffet options can be delivered on ten days' notice, and what deposit terms apply.
They pencil a provisional hold into Collins, re-keying the date, headcount, room and buffet choice.
They switch back to Gmail and write the reply, plainly and quickly, with the options and the cost.
They keep the conversation open in Hiver, because the family will confirm within a day or two.
The family replies: "It may be 65, and could we have the room from midday?" Sixty-five may not fit the room and midday changes the buffet timing. The agent repeats steps 3 to 7.
Every enquiry is handled twice, in two systems, by a person copying the same fields between screens. This example shows exactly what Hiver fixes and what it does not. Hiver makes sure that enquiry is seen, owned and escalated fast, which genuinely matters here. It cannot tell the agent whether the room is free, so the answer the family needs still waits on a tab switch. One operations director described the inbox behind this workflow as "a black hole, no KPIs, no response rate, nothing." Hiver lights up the response rate. It cannot show you the booking.
The sharper cost is the enquiry you never hear about again. Short-notice enquiries go to whoever answers first, and a slow reply is not just lost revenue but a family let down. A roughly 40-venue entertainment group lost a single booking worth £40,000 because the enquiry arrived outside working hours and nobody replied in time. A three-site pizza group put it more bluntly about a 30 to 40 cover enquiry: "It just sat there. No one saw it. They went somewhere else." Hiver did not cause those losses. Routing bookings through a system that cannot book anything is what makes the delay inevitable.
What Hiver actually connects to
Hiver integrates with more than 100 apps, and the named ones tell you who it sells to: Salesforce, HubSpot, QuickBooks, Okta, Jira, Slack, NetSuite, Shopify and Asana. It also offers a Zapier connector and the Hiver API for custom builds, and Harvey, its AI bot, suggests relevant templates, closes conversations and marks spam.
None of those is a venue booking system. This deserves stating carefully, because Hiver publishes a hospitality help-desk page that mentions integrating with booking engines and guest-management systems. That is general copy aimed largely at hotels, and what backs it is the 100-plus business apps, Zapier and the API rather than any named venue platform. So Hiver has not ignored hospitality. It has not built for the diary, and with Collins the usual fallback is missing too.
Collins connects outward through its own API to point-of-sale, payment and marketing systems rather than exposing a general automation connector, and it is not on Zapier. So bridging to Hiver means a custom development project against Hiver's API and the Collins API. That is a real engineering budget for a venue group, and what it buys is enquiry text landing in a Gmail conversation, one direction, treated as a message. Harvey helps with the writing rather than the booking. It can surface the right private-hire template and cannot tell you whether the room is free.
There is one more gap for a multi-site group. Hiver's structure is Gmail's structure: mailboxes, labels and rules. A label is not a venue. There is no native concept of which site an enquiry belongs to, no per-venue tone, and no reporting by location, so nobody can see which site is slow on its most valuable threads.
Why this matters for booking enquiries
A support conversation and a booking enquiry look similar and behave nothing alike. A support conversation is resolved by a reply. A private-hire enquiry is only resolved when the space is held, the package is agreed and the deposit has landed. That difference is the whole problem.
Hiver makes the email accountable, and on a high-priority enquiry that is worth having. It still cannot book the room. The transaction, the part that actually earns the revenue, lands on your team, one enquiry at a time.
What it looks like when the tool is built for booking enquiries
The gap closes when the enquiry and the function diary are the same surface, so a private-hire question does not become a week of forwarded email. This is what RevVue does, and it is easier to show than to describe.
Every enquiry is tagged to the venue it concerns, which matters for a group whose sites each hold several private rooms. The team stops opening messages just to work out which building is being asked about, and works from one queue, by location, rather than labels standing in for venues.
One queue per venue, so an enquiry about a private room reaches the people who run it.
The AI drafts the reply in the venue's voice, using its own capacities, its minimum spends and what each room can seat. Event enquiries are the longest threads a venue handles, and starting from a drafted answer removes most of the typing.
A drafted reply carrying the venue's own capacities and terms, ready to approve.
Because it connects to the booking system, the AI takes the step Hiver cannot: it checks the space against the date and prepares the booking in the thread. Simple date questions are answered on arrival, and the enquiries worth thousands are acknowledged within moments and held in a queue a person works through.
The large-event enquiries held, prepared and visible, instead of buried in a shared inbox.
And because every enquiry belongs to a venue, private hire finally has a funnel. Enquiry volume, reply speed and conversion by site: the reporting a function diary cannot produce, because it only ever sees the events that were confirmed. Hiver reports on mailbox SLAs and response times, none of which tells you how much function revenue the inbox lost.
Enquiries, response times and conversion by location, including the ones that never got booked.
An honest note on where RevVue is today
RevVue's Collins integration is on the roadmap, and the honest position today is an email-only pilot. That pilot already delivers the inbox value shown above: location-aware routing, instant acknowledgement, AI-drafted replies, high-value bookings surfaced, and reporting by location. The direct booking-system connection will deepen that when it lands, but it does not gate the value you get today. The UK AI is in pilot.
This is the move the Brasilia Group made, off a horizontal helpdesk and onto an inbox built for the job. Their founder, Nikolaos Kiosses, put it plainly: "The transition from Zendesk to RevVue has been a game changer."
If your enquiries currently live in a shared Gmail account, replacing a shared Gmail inbox for a restaurant group is the most relevant read next. Because private-hire and large-party enquiries are the highest-value threads a venue handles, how to triage high-value group bookings is worth reading too. To see what the AI would have said to a real enquiry your team received last week, book 20 minutes.
Frequently asked questions
Does Hiver integrate with Collins?
No. Hiver has no native integration with Collins, and no venue booking system appears in Hiver's app library. Collins is not on Zapier either, so there is no low-code bridge. Connecting them means a custom development project against Hiver's API and the Collins API, and even then it only copies enquiry text into a Gmail conversation. It cannot hold a room, build a package, or take a deposit in Collins.
Can I connect Hiver and Collins with Zapier?
No. Hiver has a Zapier connector, but Collins is not on Zapier, so there is no zap to build. Collins connects outward through its own API to point-of-sale, payment and marketing systems rather than exposing a general automation connector, which leaves custom development as the only route.
Hiver's website mentions booking engines. Does that include venue diaries?
Not in any named sense. Hiver publishes a hospitality help-desk page that refers to booking engines and guest-management systems, which is general copy aimed largely at hotels, and it is backed by Hiver's 100-plus business apps, its Zapier connector and its API rather than by any named venue booking platform. Connecting Collins means a custom build, and that still cannot check space availability or take a deposit.
What do events and private-hire venues use instead?
Most stay on a shared inbox and accept the double-handling, because no general-purpose tool solved the booking side. A purpose-built option is RevVue, which is location-aware and whose AI checks availability and prepares the booking inside the conversation, with high-value private-hire enquiries surfaced for a person to nurture. Its Collins integration is on the roadmap, with an email-only pilot available now.
