Years after building from scratch a meetings management program that featured consolidated negotiations for transient and meeting hotel contracts and the development of a standard hotel contract for meetings, M&T Bank turned online to improve program compliance and attendee management, and help expand the program's reach. Meanwhile, the bank deployed a new set of metrics designed to measure its travel and meetings department's scope and effectiveness.
M&T has operations in the mid-Atlantic and Northeast United States, with its strongest representation in Baltimore and in Buffalo, N.Y., its headquarters city, and annually spends between $4 million and $6 million on meetings. Led by vice president of corporate travel and meetings Paulette Miklas, the company's combined travel and meetings management department resides under the bank's corporate services umbrella, with direct relationships with internal resources and procurement departments.
That configuration has helped M&T develop a closely tied hotel sourcing program in which meetings frequently are located at transient hotels, often at negotiated transient rates. Such moves led to verifiable savings on meetings spending and helped raise the eight-year-old travel and meetings department's profile. But improving compliance to an M&T policy requiring each of the bank's more than 100 meetings per year to be registered with the department, while simultaneously driving some offsite events to onsite locations or virtual realms, necessitated a new set of online tools.
[PROFILE_1] Equalizing Meetings And Paper Clips
For years, the process of registering a meeting had been somewhat casual, Miklas said, in contrast to robust M&T procedures for the procurement of other supplies. "We were being too soft with our internal clients, just taking their information quickly by phone or by email," she said. "Here we are spending roughly $4 million to $6 million [on meetings], and we weren't asking anyone to fill out a request form, but if you wanted a pen or a paper clip from procurement, you had to go through the process and fill out a form. Why couldn't it be the same for meetings?"
It could, as M&T found out in 2009. The meetings department posted an online meeting request form on the corporate intranet, developed internally--a common theme at M&T, which outsources almost nothing related to meetings management--and tied directly to Miklas' inbox.
Completed by the meeting budget-holder, the online form allows Miklas not only to help ensure preferred venues are used for site selection and contracts are properly negotiated but also to avoid unnecessary offsite events.
"When they complete the form, they are giving us an overview of what the meeting is," Miklas explained. "Our first line of questioning is, "Can we hold this meeting onsite in an M&T facility?" They have to answer. Under our policy, we suggest all meetings of less than 20 attendees should be held onsite or at a site where there is no cost to the bank. If they say that they can't, because it's a confidential meeting, for example, or there is no space at our facilities, then we look to our preferred family of hotels and resorts, understanding how many days the meeting is and how much space they need. We go out and source it, ask hoteliers if they have space and set up the request for proposals."
Miklas' department, however, neither charges individual business units for its services nor signs the resulting contract. "We're just the salesperson," she said. "We want them to take authority and responsibility for the dollar value that we've entered into the contract."
The move has helped raise meeting-registration compliance to about 50 percent, with higher rates in Buffalo and Baltimore. While one bad experience with a costly cancellation clause often sets a rogue planner straight, the first method of combating other noncompliance is communication, Miklas said, ensuring the meeting budget-holder in question is aware of proper procedure.
"We show the advantages of using our department," she said. "One, there is a liability. Two, cost. Three, it's because we can negotiate rates and concessions on such a deep level. That's usually when we bring them to our side."
[PULL_1] Standard Contracts, Better Deals
Those negotiated rates and concessions are the result of a mature transient and meetings hotel program crafted during the eight years Miklas has headed the department. While pure synergy between meetings site selection and transient hotels isn't realistic due to the full-service requirements of many meetings, M&T works to place its offsite events at its 50 preferred transient properties in 23 cities, and will try to introduce transient deals at hotels it's used to host meetings.
"One thing we look to negotiate from the get-go is whether we can use our transient rate as the group rate if it makes sense from a cost perspective," Miklas said. "This is where we start seeing the leverage of volume."
Especially for meetings in Buffalo, Miklas said, "We go after our second-biggest spend, which is food and beverage. On the transient side, we will look at a complimentary continental breakfast. On the event side, we look at a percentage off the F&B catering menus, since they're typically not going to give us a complimentary continental breakfast for groups. For groups, it's usually 10 percent to 15 percent off. We'll ask for [a discount off prices from] the year prior, so hotels can't give us that discount, then raise prices for 2011."
About 90 percent of M&T's meeting hotels--or 95 percent when only considering the company's overwhelmingly domestic volume--agree to use a standard meetings contract developed by the bank. The nine-page document includes language covering everything from guest room reservation procedures and check-in and checkout times to force majeure and termination clauses. The contract smoothes negotiations and ensures acceptable levels of liability, Miklas said.
"We made it fair and consistent with current industry contracts so we would not receive pushback," Miklas said. "The legal team and I took four or five brand-name contracts and pulled them apart--what we like, what we didn't like--and then added the M&T spin on it. It sets our expectations up front, and no matter what sales manager we work with, it's very easy." Using the contract, Miklas' department negotiated about $150,000 in hard-dollar concessions during 2009. "We track the hard cost of negotiations for each meeting, then we put it into a report and a database," she explained. "We indicate if we were able to negotiate the rate, then multiply the rate savings by the number of room nights. F&B and other concessions like upgrades are part of it, as there's a value to them."
Expanding Measurement, Scope
Miklas' department during the past few years has enhanced the M&T meetings program with several additions to the corporate intranet, including a meeting planner toolkit (with a suggested planning timeline, a sample direct-bill request and guidance on setting meeting objectives), a meeting cost calculator and an Excel spreadsheet that compares the potential costs and environmental impacts of an offsite meeting, an onsite meeting and a video- or teleconference.
Miklas last year contracted with meetings management technology firm SignUp4--the program's only outside vendor--to aid attendee-registration processes, particularly for attendees who have no access to the corporate intranet.
Further expanding the scope of the meetings program, though, including raising compliance beyond 50 percent, especially beyond its largest cities, first requires new metrics, Miklas said. "It's about taking a look at the tools we currently have in place: What does our policy look like? What do our resources look like? That's where we're challenged right now, from a resource perspective," Miklas said. "We need to really show senior management that we need more, so we've begun this year to work on meeting metrics. You look at travel metrics, and industry practice is that there's $1 million in air spend for every agent. With meetings, there is nothing like that."
As such, Miklas' department has started to chart the number of person-hours dedicated to M&T meetings management, including the actual planning the department handles for meetings attended by senior management. "We now have metrics in place to tell us how many hours we've used on events by our department: the number of requests coming in, how much time we have taken for the process of the initial request, the negotiating and the contract execution," she said. "We look at quarter-over-quarter and year-to-date data."
The data will be used to bolster the case for the next step. "I could have the best strategic meetings management program plan out there, and I could put it in a policy, but what it comes down to is that you need the resources that are dedicated to it, whether you have an internal department that does it or you outsource," Miklas said. "We're in the financial industry, so anything that matters has to be put in a metric. We can't just say we need a department of five. We need to prove we need a department of five."