Performance and meetings management firm Carlson Marketing Group has dissolved its alliance with GetThere DirectMeetings and is integrating its internal technological systems and processes with those of its sister company, mega agency Carlson Wagonlit Travel, in the anticipation of greater client interest in leveraging transient and meeting expenditures and strategic site selection measures. The change will allow Carlson and its clients to better assess weaknesses in corporate meeting program structures and subsequent opportunities for savings, said CMG vice president of business development Peter Moen.
GetThere DirectMeetings had supplied much of the technology behind Carlson's MeetingsLogic meeting data consolidation tool
(Meetings Today, May 21, 2001), in exchange for transaction fees. The partnership, formed in October 2000, dissolved in December, Moen said. "We've instead integrated with the CWT proprietary airline and hotel database because we needed a global database and a customer-specific airline database," he said. "Theirs was static; ours is refreshed every month with customer-specific information. They were able to do that with hotel data, but not air."
The end result, Moen said, are processes with the ability to help bring customers to the next step of meetings consolidation and management. "Customers are seeking increased leverage and lower process costs," he said. "They want to leverage corporate travel processes with the meetings side. Using some CWT technology and methodologies, we can start them on strategic sourcing methods to help them leverage spend on hotel."
While not a brand-new concept, nor one that is specific to Carlson, strategic site selection—aligning the selection of meeting destinations with the routes served by preferred carriers and locations of preferred hotels—is a concept that has grown in prominence during the past few years. Several corporations are vesting further site selection control in a centralized point. Doing so can put a company on the road to more meeting savings, Moen said. "As an example, let's say a client narrows its air coverage on the corporate travel side for coverage without overlap, but still has its air spend on a nonpreferred carrier," he said. "There are still attendees going to meetings in cities where their preferred carriers don't have service. It's not a compliance problem, the traveler didn't choose the meeting site, but why go there? To fly to these cities for a meeting, you use a nonpreferred carrier. Sometimes there's flexibility, but sometimes there's not."
The registration of meetings and subsequent analysis of data can allow these decisions to be made with more accurate information, Moen said. Still, the number of corporations prepared to take this step is not very high, he acknowledged.
Implementing such a program inherently implies a level of authority on the part of the meeting manager that few possess. Also, not many corporate policies mandate that meeting site selection must be in accordance with preferred airline or hotel programs. "It's easier said than done, and not everyone has the decision-making authority to do all of this," Moen said. "Yet, more people are getting it, and the economy is driving people to do things they never thought of in the past."