Amex, Maritz Look Ahead As Maxvantage Meetings Partnership Fizzles

A month before the official death of their nearly four-year-old Maxvantage partnership, American Express and Maritz Travel this week indicated they planned to continue to offer separately the strategic meetings management services they once had teamed up to deliver to the corporate market.

An American Express spokesperson confirmed that the two parties officially would dissolve Maxvantage in May.

Maxvantage debuted in 2009 as an alliance between the mega travel management company and the meetings management firm, targeting corporate clients with a joint strategic meetings management offering. Maritz Travel senior vice president and general manager Steve O'Malley, who headed Maxvantage, in an interview this week declined to comment on the split. Joint clients were assigned to Amex or Maritz after the parties "looked at the needs of individual clients and tried to determine the best fit based on relationships and services that are being provided," O'Malley said.

As recently as October 2011, Maritz Travel CEO David Peckinpaugh said he was "very bullish" about Maxvantage's "long-term growth," but both Maritz and American Express since have undergone changes. Maritz in April 2012 acquired meetings management firm Experient, broadening its meetings client base beyond corporations. American Express this January indicated it was "reengineering the business model" for its global business travel unit, which it said would bear "the largest impact" of 5,400 job cuts planned for this year. Among the departures will be senior vice president and general manager of global business partnerships and premium services Hervé Sedky this summer, according to The Beat. Sedky in 2009 spearheaded the Maxvantage initiative with Maritz Travel then-CEO Christine Duffy, who left the company in 2011 to head the Cruise Lines International Association.

O'Malley confirmed that Maritz would continue to offer SMM services to its corporate clients. E-mailed comments from Amex attributed to American Express Meetings & Events vice president and general manager Issa Jouaneh indicated that the TMC also would continue to address the market.

Alluding to the Experient acquisition, O'Malley said Martiz is "a very different company today than we were even a year ago," one which would provide an SMM offering "that's a lot more scalable" considering how "the marketplace has shifted over the past few years."

He said the SMM market "has been focused for probably too long on simply the delivery and is missing out on some of the important elements that we'll be able to bring to bear as we re-approach this. [We're] looking at the focus on the guests themselves, the attendees of these meetings. We're going to focus on not just delivery, but also the design of the meetings and the design of how we're approaching a portfolio of events as well as on the measurement of those events and making sure the corporate clients that are deploying these solutions are getting the right return for the investments."

While corporations remain interested in meetings management solutions, O'Malley said, "many companies when they approach the concept of SMM don't know where to start. We've seen over the past few years a lot of clients just interested in, 'Hey, just help me do some sourcing.' We have the opportunity now to start there: as small as simply beginning to source and log programs in order to begin gathering data to help clients determine what their journey needs to look like. We've seen some rather large clients in the past few years that have decided to go with a site-selection approach alone, and eventually I believe they'll mature into something that is much more around design, delivery and measurement. But we need to meet the marketplace where it is, and if simple site selection is where a client wants to start, we have the ability to do that through the Experient sales network."

Operationally, O'Malley said Maritz is ready to offer its separate SMM service, and clients "will see no change in the short term."

American Express also will offer meetings management services, though Jouaneh's statement alluded to a technological bent to the TMC's offering: "As we look down the road, we believe the industry is now at a stage where technology is able to meaningfully impact our clients. This may be through extending existing face-to-face meetings into hybrid events, being strategic in how companies integrate these solutions at the point of sale to drive demand management, or using these tools to drive better meeting outcomes for our clients. Attendees now expect a continuous engagement with their meeting, pre-, post- and during, but also seek flexibility in how and when they engage with the content and the company instead of a fixed time frame or location. Through our deep connection to the meetings marketplace and knowledge of our clients' needs, we are working with our clients to evaluate the ways these changes are shifting how companies design their meetings experiences to be effective and to achieve the meeting objectives.

"We believe that the next phase of SMM will be to move into Digital Meetings Management," Jouaneh continued, where we will help companies take the discipline of SMM and apply it through integrated technology that delivers end-to-end capabilities as opposed to what can be a fragmented process today."