Best Meeting Practitioners 2008: Thomson's Heston Develops KPI-Based Hotel Sourcing Gauge

French professional media and entertainment services group Thomson SA last year introduced a key performance indicator checklist that shows the overall costs for a meeting stakeholder's choice of venue, and developed a meetings registration and agenda tool, enabling hotel spending data to be tracked.

A hotel sourcing process introduced when Thomson's meetings management was brought under the travel umbrella in June 2007, put a spreadsheet of key performance indicators for meetings into place, said manager of corporate travel worldwide Cindy Heston.

The spreadsheet weighs and compares approximately 20 aspects of meeting offerings at the multiple hotels that Heston's team is required to source, she said. The aspects include sleeping rooms, conference space, value-added taxes and other taxes, Internet and Wi-Fi options, transportation, meals, audiovisual capabilities, cancellation and attrition terms, deposits, cutoff dates for names, and food and beverage minimums.

The number of hotel offers considered depends on the size of the meeting. For example, three competitive offers are considered for meetings of 30 to 50 attendees, increasing to five properties for meetings of 100 or more attendees.

When a meeting stakeholder submits a request for a hotel in a specific area and range of service, Heston's department will come back with similar properties and show the overall costs of each.

"Here's this property, but here's four other properties in that area. Here's what they have to offer in order to get your business, here's some of the different opportunities that they'll bring to you that you don't have with your existing property," Heston said.

The spreadsheet lists each of these categories, which can be filled with a percentage or a yes or no depending on the category. For example, one property might offer 10 percent attrition, while another offers 20 percent. Each category is weighted, and the department assigns a value to calculate the overall cost of the event. The KPIs are based on each individual event's negotiations.

"We try to look at all the different areas of cost and give them an overall view," Heston said. "When you look at everything on a very broad scope, you're able to really add a lot of amenities into the offering that at a local level they may not be looking at. They may not even be aware that these kind of things are available for negotiation."

The negotiations are split into first, second and third rounds, in between which Heston's three-person department analyzes the hotels' offers and recommends a course of action to the meeting stakeholder.

Part of the KPI is a turnaround time of the meeting request of 48 to 72 hours, Heston said. "That's the other key element: gathering the data as quickly as possible and turning it around back to the business," she said. "What I've seen happen many times is that if we hold onto something for a week and don't get back to the customer, then we go and say, 'The hotel you really wanted wasn't available,' guess what they're thinking: 'If I picked up the phone and called them directly a week ago, I would've gotten what I wanted.' It's key that we respond back within two to three business days. It really helps with credibility if we're able to get back in a very timely manner."

Last October, Thomson, which Heston said annually spends "a good $8 million to $10 million,"on meetings, launched an internally developed online meetings registration tool in Europe and began using it in the United States in January. "We have a registration page and an agenda page. We send out a link, and the information has been stored in the document in different views. We have a view for internal employees, we have a view for external," Heston said.

Prior to the use of the tool, the company had never tracked hotel spending through its travel management company, American Express, which manages smaller meetings on Thomson's behalf. Now, the data is given to Amex and is categorized by business unit. Even though transient spending is down for the year, in January and April hotel spending has increased 50 percent due to data being tracked.