Meeting buyers were advised to develop standard contracts, partner with procurement for consolidation and show their value to management at Corporate Travel World in New York last month. Hotel negotiations and corporate policy dominated discussions of meeting management strategies, as buyers feel the pinch of higher hotel rates
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Meeting buyers advocated strategic, long-term relationships with preferred hotel vendors to negotiate space and services. Rich Del Colle, meetings and events supplier manager for Hewlett-Packard Co., said that total spend and history are the two most important leverage points in negotiations with hotels.
More companies are developing standard addenda to hotel contracts that cover such legal issues as which U.S. state a lawsuit would be filed in the event of a dispute, and standard clauses for attrition, cancellation and data privacy.
Also new in hotel negotiations are postponement clauses which reduce cancellation fees if a company can rebook the event at a later date, said John Lowry, manager of meeting planning and the hotel program at New York-based Altria Group Inc., the parent of Kraft Foods and Philip Morris.
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Consolidation is the key to leveraging meeting spend with corporate travel spend, said Dick Zeller, vice president of consolidation solutions for meetings management firm Maritz McGettigan.
Although many companies for years have centralized corporate transient travel, most corporations are not tracking their total meeting spend, Zeller said. Meeting stakeholders resist seeing their event as a commodity, he said, and often are unwilling to turn over control to a central meeting department. "Meeting consolidation hasn't worked in more cases than it has worked," Zeller said.
As procurement and finance departments step up oversight on cost avoidance, corporate meeting buyers have a new opportunity to push consolidation. Terri Carlton, manager of meeting services and corporate travel for Chicago-based BlueCross BlueShield Association, advised meeting buyers to partner with procurement to set goals and measurements for cost avoidance.
"If you don't track what you save and what you spend, then you're not doing your job," Carlton said. "You have to be proactive and show how you save the company money."
Craig Ardis, director of global special events for Ada, Mich.-based Amway Corp., said crucial factors for the success of a meetings consolidation initiative are the identification of preferred suppliers, the recruitment of internal advocates for meeting policies and the establishment of clear goals and strategies for meetings management. Amway can direct its transient corporate travel to hotels used for events, he said, and leverage the total spend in contract negotiations.
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Panelists Barbara Cummins, associate director of meeting management services at New York-based PricewaterhouseCoopers, and Connie Bocchieri, manager of group air and meeting services at New York-based Pfizer Inc., said developing a meeting management policy requires clear goals, data and support from senior management.
"The process is long and slow," Bocchieri said. Pfizer identified who was signing meeting contracts through the records of their suppliers, she said. PwC used an in-depth internal survey to help identify spend. "The pain was worth it," Cummins said, noting PwC identified potential savings of $16 million to $32 million one year after adopting a meetings management policy.
Pamela Wynne, manager of corporate meeting planning for Princeton, N.J.-based Educational Testing Service, said her department created a "domino effect" to create a companywide meetings policy. By first showing success in a few key departments, other sections of the company were more willing to adopt the policy, she said.