What actually happens when someone submits an enquiry
When a client submits an enquiry (through Plan My Party or a direct listing enquiry), Party Hero's matching engine checks it against every live listing in the right category, filters out anyone who genuinely can't serve that lead, scores everyone who's left, and sends the enquiry to the strongest matches – up to six suppliers per category. Here's exactly what happens at each step, and which parts you can actually influence.
Step one: the hard filters – miss one and you're not even in the running
Before any scoring happens, a listing has to clear every one of these, or it's excluded entirely:
- Your listing must be live. A draft, paused or pending listing is invisible to matching, full stop.
- You're in the right top-level category the client selected.
- You serve the client's suburb – if you've tagged specific service suburbs, the client's suburb needs to be one of them. Leave suburbs blank and you're treated as serving everywhere, which passes this filter but scores lower on fit than an exact match (more on that below).
- Your capacity genuinely fits their group size – if you've set a capacity and they've given a guest count, a real shortfall excludes you outright.
- You're not on a 7-day cooldown from ignoring leads (see our Responding Fast guide for exactly how that's triggered).
- You haven't already hit 5 leads today in that category – a fairness cap so one supplier can't absorb an entire day's demand, not a penalty on you.
Step two: the real scoring formula
Everyone who clears the filters gets scored across eight factors, each with a genuine, fixed weight in the final score:
- Location fit – 18% – does your service area match their suburb?
- Tier – 14% – Free, Pro or Multi-Listing
- Capacity fit – 13% – how closely your capacity matches their group size
- Budget fit – 13% – your price range vs. their stated budget
- Occasion fit – 13% – do you serve the specific event type they picked?
- Conversion history – 13% – your real track record turning enquiries into bookings
- Response speed – 8% – your average time to respond to enquiries
- Google reviews – 8% – your Google rating
A few of these work differently to how they might look at first glance:
Tier is a real, substantial factor, not a marketing line. Free listings get zero credit on this dimension; Pro gets a strong boost; Multi-Listing gets the maximum. At 14% of the total score, it's one of the single biggest levers in the whole formula – exactly what "priority AI enquiry matching" on the pricing page actually means in practice.
An inflated capacity doesn't help you – it can actively hurt you. Capacity fit is scored as how closely your capacity matches the group size, not just whether you technically fit them. A listing capped at 500 scores worse against a 20-guest enquiry than a listing honestly capped at 30 would. Keep your capacity accurate to what you can genuinely deliver well, not the biggest number you could justify.
Being upfront about extra fees improves your match quality, not just your honesty. If you've filled in an estimate for add-on costs (BYO, staff, wharf or bump-in fees, cleaning), that amount comes off the client's stated budget before your price range is compared against it. Leaving it blank doesn't dodge this – it just means a client whose true affordable budget is lower than they think gets matched to you anyway, which tends to produce a worse enquiry, not a better one.
Tag every real occasion you serve – narrow tagging can score worse than none at all. A listing with no occasion tags at all is treated as "serves everyone" and scores reasonably (0.8 of this factor). But a listing that has tagged specific occasions and doesn't include the one the client picked scores much lower (0.3) than that untagged default. If you genuinely host a wide range of events, tag broadly and accurately – a narrow, incomplete tag list can cost you more than not tagging at all.
Conversion history and response speed reward consistency over time, not a single good week. Both are still building up as real behavioural data accumulates platform-wide – see our Responding Fast guide for what's already fully live today (the cooldown penalty) versus what's ramping up.
A missing Google rating isn't scored as zero. No rating yet defaults to a fair, neutral 0.6 out of this factor – better to build a genuine review base than worry that a quiet start counts against you. See our Reviews 101 guide for how to build it.
What's genuinely outside your control
The client's own suburb, budget, guest count and occasion are exactly that – theirs. You're not competing to change what they asked for, only to be the strongest genuine fit for it among everyone eligible. A "low score" on one enquiry usually just means it wasn't the right fit for that specific brief, not that something is broken with your listing.
The bottom line: what to actually go do
In order of effort vs. impact:
- Tag your service suburbs precisely rather than leaving them blank
- Set an honest capacity – accurate, not maximised
- Fill in your extra fees estimate so you're matched against clients who can genuinely afford you
- Tag every occasion you actually host, not just the obvious ones
- Build your Google review base (guide here)
- Respond fast and avoid the cooldown (guide here)
- Weigh up Pro or Multi-Listing if you're serious about volume – tier alone is worth 14% of every score, before any of the above