Sheri Bonsall
Former New Jersey Business Travel Association president Sheri Bonsall is vice president of corporate travel, meetings and fleet with Chubb Group of Insurance Companies. She spoke last month with Management.travelabout meetings management and technology for booking and data reporting. An excerpt of the discussion follows.
What new things have you been working on in your program?
We're really working this year to figure out how to best position the meetings department. We need to get out and advertise it more within the company. In the past, our meetings department was for order taking. Not to diminish what they did, but now the meeting planners have much more opportunity to be strategic and consultative. I want them to go on site selection with customers, to be involved with the meetings associations and to be empowered to deliver what a strategic meetings management program really is.
What technologies have you incorporated?
We have had StarCite online registration for a couple years now, which is integrated with the Cliqbook online booking tool and our e-fulfillment center. To give the registration tool some visibility, we also utilized it for different things like webcasts. That gave it mass visibility, so that now when I talk to people about it, most people have registered for something on this tool and they really see the benefit of it. We also have had the StarCite sourcing tool for about a year, and it has really helped us understand better what our customers want, such as what kind of locale. It also offers a historical directory of all our meetings. So we have solid technology, and now we are working towards making that area more strategic.
Are you doing anything to improve upon compliance to preferred booking channels when it comes to lodging reservations?
We have tried to utilize our security tool to help people realize it's not just about airline compliance. It's multi-fold. You want the spend and leverage, et cetera, and to understand the trends and where people are going so that helps us manage the program and get lower prices ... but on top that, it's important to have it hotel booking compliance from a security standpoint. We understand there will always be conferences and things like that which will make it a challenge, but I think it's an educational issue. Fortunately, being in the risk management business ourselves, our travelers are very quick to understand the benefits of the system. When we explain the rationale of booking entire passenger name records on our booking tool, they immediately understand where we are coming from. I have anecdotes I like to tell, such as during a hurricane, we had a traveler who we were able to alert and get him to the airport in time for a flight. He never would have made that flight if we didn't get in touch with him, and we knew how to contact him because he made the hotel reservation using our tool. Even though we're in a self-service environment, that hands-on service is possible because we're getting information through our security portal. So that has helped [with hotel booking channel compliance]. We can tell by the amount of entries in the security tool that this process is working. We're also processing the group bookings in the security tool, as well. Amex is helping us with that.
What are you looking for when it comes to data reporting tools?
The agency sends us some data and we also have a tool and credit card reporting. There needs to be advances in that area amongst everyone. I know some companies have multi-faceted, integrated types of reporting, but I'm not sure how well they are working. I think that's the next big bang. It will be something when the investment can be justified to the cost of those products, and the suppliers in the reporting space should be trying to figure out how to do it because there's so much value there. There are so many sources of data that if you can pull them together, it will be a real win. And then, of course, there is the ease of getting reports with a single click as opposed to building reports. There is a lot of technology out there, and as a travel manager I find much of the data is very operationally focused; keeping it simple will allow the ability to report on it responsibly and comprehensively.
After the content conflict last year, do you have a different perspective on distribution technology?
It was an unsettling period, no question. When it comes to content delivery, the interested parties were not in a position to do anything differently and they had to come to terms. Everyone is very interlocked; not to say that can't change, but not now. We're keeping an eye on it.