Intent does not survive the tab
A confirmation page is the only screen in your funnel where the visitor has already said yes. Every other page is persuasion; this one is relief. It is also, for anyone travelling to you, the exact moment the second set of questions starts — where to sleep, where to park, how to get from one to the other — and those questions get answered somewhere. They just do not get answered by you.
The practical consequence is that the confirmation page is the highest-intent, lowest-competition screen you own, and on most event and venue sites it says thank you and nothing else. It is a receipt where it could be an answer.
What actually happens in the ten minutes after checkout
The attendee who needs a bed does not wait. They open a new tab and start looking, and whatever they find first sets the price they pay and the company they pay it to. Nothing about that transaction involves you, even though your event is the entire reason it happened.
That is worth sitting with, because it reframes what the page is for. You are not trying to sell them something extra. You are trying to be the place they get an answer they were going to look for anyway, thirty seconds earlier than they would have found it themselves.
Why the timing beats the room block
A room block is a decision made months out about a demand curve nobody can see yet. In a real event market we measured, roughly 70% of the lodging money was committed inside the final 30 days, and about 31% of it went to properties inside a block that had already sold out. Both halves of that matter: the demand is large, and it arrives far too late for a contract signed a year earlier to catch it.
The confirmation page has the opposite property. It fires at the moment each individual attendee decides, whenever that is, which means it is aimed at the part of the curve a block structurally cannot reach.
What good looks like
The bar is low and specific. Real places to stay near your venue, on your dates, with real prices, presented on the page the attendee is already looking at. Not a link to a search engine, not a generic hotel partner banner, and not a form that asks them to start over somewhere else.
The version that works is the one that costs the attendee nothing in effort. They have just finished a checkout; anything that feels like a second checkout gets closed. What they will do is look at a short list of places that are obviously near the thing they just bought a ticket to.
What it costs you
Nothing, if it is built properly. No inventory, no contract, no minimum, no risk transfer. Bookings carry a 15 to 20% commission and the split only happens when a booking happens, which means the page either earns or it does not, and the downside case is the situation you are in today.
The work is a placement decision and a link. That is deliberately the whole ask, because a confirmation page change that needs a development sprint does not get made.