Managing Meetings At CA: Attendee Software Simplifies Tech Co.'s Large Event

IT management software provider CA, formerly known as Computer Associates, reduced man-hours and organized and simplified the hotel booking process for attendees of a large client-facing conference by implementing housing registration software.

In the past, the company used Excel spreadsheets to manage hotel reservations for the annual CA World conference, consisting of more than 5,000 attendees and 2,000 staff members.

"We were doing everything manually, with Excel spreadsheets, one for each hotel, and it got up the point where we were up to using about 40 hotels and it was just really, really difficult to manage," said director of event strategy Madeleine Brust.

The conference, with attendees from all over the world, is one week long and uses 6,000 room nights on peak. It has 60 housing sub-blocks in order to accommodate attendees' individual needs.

"It was very hard to take a step back and see how well it was working for us. There was just so much data, so many different hotels, so many different property management systems that they were using. It was very difficult to get your hands around the whole thing," she said.

In 2001 and 2002, the company held CA World in Orlando, where several hotels were using Passkey, an online hotel registration system.

"Several of the hotels in Orlando were already using Passkey, and the convention and visitors bureau acted as our housing bureau and managed the blocks through Passkey," Brust said.

After 2002, the company moved the event to a location that didn't use the system, and since CA didn't want to have to switch to another system, in 2003 the company licensed the Passkey software and began managing it themselves. The number of hotels used was reduced as well, due to using larger hotels.

Last year, the company created a new registration system from the ground up designed around Passkey. The previous system was internal and not designed for client-based events. Prior to that, attendees would either contact a call center or fax in their request, and room lists were compiled manually. Attendees now go to the CA World Web site for registration.

"Everything is Web-based and at the end of the registration page, they're linked directly into Passkey. We use the same codes in the registration system that are set up for sub-blocks within Passkey, so it is a very smooth process for people. It's definitely that instant result for the customer," CA's Brust said.

The implementation of the system has allowed CA to reduce the amount of people working on the conference. CA began outsourcing a few years ago, and there now is only one full-time person brought in two or three months before housing registration is open, with a few extra people brought in later. The extra staffers work part-time until immediately before the event starts, when they become full-time. Previously, at least three people had been brought in to work full-time.

"When it was manual, obviously it took a lot more man-hours to try and decipher the data and make decisions," Brust said.

Using Passkey also has allowed Brust to greater control hotel inventory and room blocks and work with hotels to reduce attrition.

"I am able to go in and look at up-to-the-minute data to show us exactly how many rooms we've booked on any one night in any particular hotel within any block," she said. "We can see where we are falling short and whether we are running out of rooms for a particular night, and we are able to move inventory between blocks to accommodate the needs of the customers. We can see where the ups and downs are occurring and where we need to do some manipulation in order to even out the inventory."

Hotels also have access to the data, so they too can see occupancy on several nights and work with Brust to rearrange room blocks.

"It opens up the line of communication very well between us and the hotels so that we can maximize the potential revenue for the hotels and minimize losses on our side," she said. "The hotels want actual people in the room rather than just getting the money for the attrition, so it helps to work with the hotels to fill in the gaps."

CA World also employs approximately 2,000 staffers, so an internal database was set to collect information that is transferred into the Passkey system. Staff and attendees are separated into two different events, due to differences in the hotel billing, but inventory can be switched from one to the other if needed.