Corporate travel sourcing veteran Michael Boult, founder and former COO of Eclipse Advisors, on May 24 joined meetings technology provider StarCite Inc. as its chief operating officer and president to lead an aggressive global expansion and to approach corporate procurement departments. Boult said his experience providing procurement solutions for corporate travel departments would be a bridge for StarCite to expand market share under the growing convergence of corporate transient travel and meetings management programs.
Boult predicted a wave of Fortune 500 companies would launch strategic meetings management initiatives in the next two years and said that the market for related services is 90 percent untapped.
"The transient side was pretty well exploited and we'd gotten to a point where the upside potential was fairly wrung out, it was almost to a point of diminishing returns," according to Boult. "That's wholly and completely different on the meeting side of the business."
Boult said he had considered moving Eclipse into the corporate group travel services market, but ultimately decided to move to StarCite. Both companies are based in Philadelphia.
"I am more comfortable in a smaller, more entrepreneurial environment," he said.
Eclipse Advisors was founded in 1999 as a service of Rosenbluth International, which was bought by American Express in 2003
(BTN, Oct. 20, 2003). Boult said he might work with many of the same procurement divisions as COO at StarCite as he previously did with Eclipse.
"The basic sell feels and seems to be quite consistent. They're looking for cost reduction, visibility of the spend and efficiency. Those things are common features that we can drag from the transient side of the house to the meetings side as well," according to Boult.
He said that StarCite would develop partnerships and services this year for the meetings management market and for customers that are melding their transient travel and group travel management strategies. "There is a lot of work to be done just to grow inside our space, but we will absolutely be looking at sensible, adjacent moves," Boult said, "certainly around the area of helping companies to fully leverage their lodging investments."
Many corporations also are asking for meetings management technology for their global operations, he said. StarCite announced a partnership on May 10 with Maritz Europa, a division of St. Louis, Mo.-based Maritz Inc., to offer strategic meetings management services in Europe
(see story). Maritz Europa will act as a general sales agent for StarCite and offer the company's meetings management technology to its customers, suppliers and other enterprises in the region, according to a company release. Boult said StarCite also is looking at expanding into such Asia/Pacific markets as Hong Kong and Australia.
"We will be providing multinational services and multilingual services in the months ahead," he said.