The changing procedures of corporate meetings management, both in the marketplace and within internal corporate structures, was front of mind at last month's Meeting Professionals International's annual World Education Conference in Toronto. Several corporate attendees spoke not only of the vagaries of doing business with suppliers in an uncertain marketplace but also noted, and lamented, the increasing influence of corporate procurement departments in meeting management.
The conference itself drew 2,900 attendees, a few hundred shy of last year's WEC in Las Vegas but nearly double that of the association's last conference in January in Honolulu.
Meanwhile, attendees were keenly interested in meetings management at the National Business Travel Association's convention, held a week earlier in Salt Lake City, as the one educational session dedicated to the topic played to a standing-room-only crowd, leading moderator and ISO meeting and travel management manager Bill Mattes to urge attendees to request more meetings-related content.
The NBTA session included a discussion on the different philosophies and measurement tools for return on investment calculation. Apple Computer measures the financial savings its consolidated meetings program generates, said global travel manager Kathleen Ramsey, projecting costs for necessary hardware, software, implementation, customization, service and transaction fees and comparing that with similar projections for reduced airfare costs, outsourcing elimination, leveraged hotel spend, the reduction of attrition costs and agent productivity.
Mattes said ISO is concerned with meeting quality and requests evaluation sheets from attendees, grading the hotel, meeting content and overall attendee experience. "That's a greater representation of ROI." Ramsey said Apple does not conduct similar evaluations but may, noting, "If we don't do a good job, it could go right to the top of the corporation. It's a good idea."
The conversation briefly turned to Internet reverse auctions for meetings, allegedly a hot topic in the transient travel management sphere
(BTN, July 29). Panelist Mark Phillips, vice president and general manager of Internet meeting portal StarCite—which officials announced upon its 1999 creation that they would offer auction capabilities but changed their minds shortly thereafter—noted one problem auctions may pose. "How often don't planners have an internal meeting sponsor they have to go back to?" Phillips asked. "If the sponsor wants to go to a competing hotel that didn't offer the lowest bid, will you go to the competing hotel or will you force the issue with the sponsor?"
MPI's Corporate Circle of Excellence, the group of about 20 high-level corporate meeting buyers who share opinions and deconstruct meeting concepts, is contemplating a number of issues from which to choose to tackle in a potential white paper later this year. The group is considering the evolution of technology tools and potential technology best practices, the marketing of the corporate meetings department to company leadership, return on investment for marketing events, centralized versus decentralized programs and combining meeting and travel departments.
In a CCOE-moderated session, attendees talked about developments in meeting pre-approval processes and the benefits of benchmarking with other companies. Several buyers noted that their companies have developed more comprehensive procedures for meeting justification, mostly involving upper management. Though some attendees said their companies frowned on meeting with competitors for such purposes, CCOE member and meeting strategy consultant Gilda Caputo, a former PricewaterhouseCoopers director of travel and meetings who had a benchmarking group that included other Big Five accounting firms, encouraged them to press the issue. "It was the best experience, and it's not like we were exchanging information on auditing clients, it was just about meetings," she said. "If you can break through to even one person who does business in meetings, it will benefit everybody."
Also generating some discussion at MPI was the issue of meeting attendees finding lower-than-negotiated hotel rates on the Web, potentially leading to bookings that are not credited to the meeting room block. Though the level of concern seemed less than the furor generated a few months back about transient Web airfares, what caused some concern was that attendee Web rate bookings conceivably could lower room block numbers to trigger a contractual attrition clause.
American Express Meetings & Incentives has added GetThere DirectMeetings to the stable of meetings technology tools it offers under its Corporate Travel Online banner, joining StarCite and B-there, said Amex M&I vice president Jay Roseman at NBTA's convention. "Customers have a lot of different approaches to meeting planning and a lot of different issues regarding getting their arms around meeting data," Roseman said. "We've aligned ourselves with best-in-breed tools we've used and understand and can apply to different situations. This strengthens our ability to integrate different solutions."
Amex Interactive Travel Group vice president of product development and communications Henry Blinder said GTDM was not brought in to replace B-there nor StarCite, but to provide a meeting air management solution.