Meetings have long represented an unfulfilled opportunity for many travel procurement professionals. Not anymore, according to three-quarters of 294 travel management and procurement professionals polled by Procurement.travelwho said they were involved in managing the meetings program within the travel function at their companies. About 40 percent were directly involved in meetings and 36 percent indirectly involved. Just 19 percent were not involved in meetings and 5 percent said their companies didn't manage meetings at all.
Yet, when asked whether they or their departments were responsible for the company's meetings program, only half claimed as much.
The schism could be the result of "a lot of companies not always realizing what meetings spend is all about," according to Pascal Struyve, Ingersoll Rand global travel, fleet and meeting services director. But "due to the [economic] crisis and all the cuts on spending, meetings spend popped up on the radar screen," prompting many to get involved but not necessarily claim responsibility for it.
For those responsible for meetings, the areas of involvement most frequently cited were: contracting, air negotiations, policy, sourcing, onsite logistics, strategic meetings management, and registration sites and tools.
Meetings sourcing, contracting and air negotiating particularly mesh with travel buyer responsibilities, as each offers the possibility to leverage with transient spending. Meetings veterans long have argued that sourcing and contracting represent the most lucrative savings potential in the planning process.
Although Struyve is responsible for his meetings program, Ingersoll Rand struggles with digesting meetings data--the meat of meetings management challenges. "There is not that much transparency around what we are spending, and it's not easy to get your arms around that question," he said. "In the Americas, we know pretty well what [the spend] is. We are gathering the data, but we had some challenges."
The study found that 24 percent of respondents were not sure of their meetings spend, including 42 percent of those working for high-technology corporations.
Navigating The Spend
Implementing a corporate meetings card can help managers gather data, Struyve said. Moving in the "right direction," Ingersoll Rand did just that but "it's going to take some time to get a better understanding of what we are up against."
Microsoft Corp. senior purchasing manager Eric Bailey, who indirectly manages meetings, said the initial stages are "to give guidance to the people who don't necessarily have the expertise," such as administrators. Also, traveling down the corporate meetings card avenue would be a best practice, he agreed. "If you have robust credit card data, it's very easy to see spikes in hotel spend. I'll look at our hotel spend by quarter and by property. If I see 95 percent of spend at a hotel in one quarter, that's not a transient hotel," Bailey said.
Acknowledging that Microsoft is "never going to have tight controls over meetings spend," Bailey said that using the meetings card data to determine with which hotels to negotiate a preferred transient contract can be a bonus. If a hotel consistently houses meetings and transient, perhaps that is a conversation to have with the properties, he said. "We know there is a lot of unmanaged spend out there. We have master agreements with some of our larger hotels that we deal with [because] a master agreement signed by Microsoft has a lot more power than a contract signed by an administrator."
Sharlene Ketwaroo-Nanoo, strategic sourcing travel analyst for Canadian Tire, agreed, noting she "dabbles" a bit in meetings "when [she] gets phone calls from administrators asking for recommendations or asking to read contracts." But Ketwaroo-Nanoo "doesn't actually manage meetings," she said. "There are so few of us who are actually doing both. At some point, we will see some sort of synergy or partnership between my group and the corporate events group. We do two very distinctive things, but there are definitely points where we could work together and leverage each other's relationships and spend. Maybe [we would] find some savings and build better relationships."
Similarly, Sapient Corp. global travel manager Michelle De Costa said her approach to meetings is "pretty decentralized today" and "isn't something that [Sapient is] looking at through a procurement lens just yet." However, she too will "get involved with [meetings management] sometimes, but it is largely done by individual departments as needed."
Of the 294 respondents, 40 percent said they were directly involved in their organizations' meetings programs. Respondents who worked for pharmas, financial services, manufacturing companies or companies with annual T&E spend of $30 million to $60 million were more likely to be directly involved in meetings than those in other sectors.
Planning 800 meetings annually, Educational Testing Services manager of travel operations Marty Hoski said most spend is calculated through an online booking tool powered by Cvent. A mandate that all meetings be charged to the corporate card was put in place to avoid liabilities that the company might incur by ensuring the finance department can track and approve all contracted meetings. ETS also is seeking to automate its registration process, whereby emergency contacts, allergies and other liabilities to ETS are electronically transmitted to meeting planners.
"The contract is a liability to the company, and 99 percent of the cases it's a financial liability," said Hoski. "That is where our concern is; to monitor what color ribbons they put up or what kind of posters they use--no, we are not involved. There is branding, there is a reputation. Minimizing risk, that's why I am looking to automate the registration process 100 percent."
Some Shy Away From Mtgs. Mgmt.
Carlson Wagonlit Travel's Travel Management Institute estimated corporations spend more that $357 billion (55 percent of the global meetings and events market) on meetings annually and could save as much as 25 percent if the category were managed. Yet, 19 percent of those polled by Procurement.travelsaid they were not involved and 5 percent said their company did not do it at all.
"That's not surprising that a lot of the companies and the travel management groups have not integrated meetings; we haven't," Canadian Tire's Ketwaroo-Nanoo said. "But [meetings management within travel] is something that is starting to happen in other companies. Some of my colleagues are now being tasked with managing their meeting spend."
The study, however, found that among those not involved, 84 percent did not expect to be involved and 72 percent thought they should not be involved going forward. Although some travel managers told Procurement.travel they agreed with Ketwaroo-Nanoo, saying they expect the role of the travel manager to involve meetings in the future, that role has yet to be defined.
"You definitely see the role of the corporate travel manager expanding to include a lot of pieces that historically would not have," said Sapient's De Costa. "That meetings management piece is a big part of it. As my role continues to change, we will look at: Does it make sense to have a meetings person on staff, or does it make more sense to outsource it? I am inclined to say that it is the latter of the two."
"I see it coming eventually, but I haven't been officially told it was something that I should be looking at," said Ketwaroo-Nanoo. "We internally have a corporate events group [that] manages the large-meeting space. But [meetings management] really could go either way; it could go to the events group or to [travel]. What's unmanaged for us is smaller, one-day meetings."
Agreeing that "sometimes the two worlds are a little bit too far apart from one another," Ingersoll Rand's Struyve said purchasers should "absolutely bring those two together to optimize and leverage in your supplier negotiations."
For Ingersoll Rand, "this is an overarching program that all becomes one in the longer term," Struyve said. "We are trying, from a preferred [hotel] property point of view, to leverage the properties we already have in our transient program to use those in the meetings program and eventually vice versa.
"If you look at it long term, it has to become one program where your meetings and groups are all embedded in [transient]," Struyve continued. "You need to work toward more of a fully integrated program if you want to have a best-in-class program. It's integrating all those aspects in a certain way that fits the culture of your company and drives the benefit that the company is looking for."
However, travel purchasers whose companies did not tackle meetings at all maintained they did not expect to do so in the future (79 percent), while 50 percent said their companies should.
"Some of us don't know how to make that transition. We've never had to do both, although some of us know the lingo, we know a little bit of the background because we deal with the hotels day in and day out. There is so much more that goes into meetings that none of us have ever dealt with or wouldn't know the first place to start," said Ketwaroo-Nanoo.
Meetings Certification A Rarity In Travel
Meanwhile, certification in meetings management remains uncommon. Of the total respondents, just 2 percent held Certified Meeting Professional status and less than 1 percent had earned the Certification in Meeting Management from Meeting Professionals International. Across all respondents, less than 24 percent held any type of certification.
"I am not sure [the National Business Travel Association's strategic meetings management certification] is the right answer for Sapient because we don't have a lot of steady meetings," said De Costa. "For an ad-hoc company like Sapient, the SMMP track wouldn't be as valuable as it would for other organizations that have a lot of meetings. We are trying to determine if [managing meetings] makes sense for us as an organization and are really looking at it."
"There's no benefit [to certification]. Yes, I would learn a lot, but where do I then apply it to my everyday job?" asked Ketwaroo-Nanoo. "I need to justify spending the time on pursuing the certification. That type of program can definitely give travel managers who are being tasked with meetings the educational background to start working in that medium. The majority of the buyers are business travel buyers; they are not meeting buyers. Although some of us are being tasked with managing meetings, it's still a small number."