Managing Meetings At: AON Corp.--Co. Mandates Registration With Mtgs. Dept.

A mandate to register all meetings through a central department and a site selection philosophy that is aligned closely with its restricted transient preferred hotel program not only has generated savings for Chicago-based insurance and consulting giant Aon Corp. but also improved employee tracking capabilities. Now, Aon is expanding its meetings management program to the United Kingdom.

Aon's program is based on two principles: ensuring contract review remains the purview of its groups and meetings department and driving meeting volume to its preferred transient hotels. The transient policy includes preferred hotels in five key cities to which travelers must book or risk non-reimbursement. These hotels, however, were selected with their meeting service offerings and capabilities in mind, said vice president of travel Harriet Washburn. "Our program is neither futuristic nor high-tech, but it certainly works," she said.

Aon policy mandates that all internal meeting sponsors contact the company's groups and meetings department, headed by director of groups and meetings Gary Pearson. Sponsors can contact the department through a registration form on the corporate intranet, but about 80 percent of contacts still are issued by telephone or e-mail, Washburn said. The department does not charge for its services and has very high compliance with the mandate, Washburn said, as its hotel partners will notify Washburn or Pearson when a meeting is booked by employees outside of their departments.

"Our hotel partners are marvelous about alerting us when that happens," Washburn said. "Some will slip through, but the hotels will call us when they do."

In addition, there are repercussions to noncompliance with the meeting registration mandate, though Washburn declined to provide details.

The mandate also enables the company to better know the whereabouts of its meeting-attending employees, a sensitive topic for a company that lost 175 employees on Sept. 11, 2001, in the destruction of the World Trade Center. "Unfortunately, since 9/11 we've had to become very security-conscious," Washburn said.

Aon, Washburn noted, is atypical of its insurance company brethren, at least concerning its meetings and incentives. Unlike other insurance firms, she said, Aon neither holds a great deal of meetings compared with its Fortune 500-size competitors nor offers a great deal of group or individual incentive travel awards. "It's a modest program according to our need," Washburn said. The company, she added, holds about 250 to 300 meetings annually, many of which are quite small.

Yet, that meetings landscape is one reason the company has found it beneficial to align its meeting site selection and transient program. The mandated transient program involves the selection of a handful of hotels in five cities that host the bulk of Aon's transient and meetings hotel business: Chicago, New York, Boston, San Francisco and London. Though there is no similar mandate to use these hotels for meetings and events, Washburn said, they were chosen, in part, due to their meeting services, and most internal sponsors find value from their use.

"Our compliance is always good, and those who do comply find enormous value," Washburn said. "The decision on the hotels and brands in the program was based on input from our director of groups and meetings, who had a big part to play. We needed hotels with good meeting capabilities, including the amount and flexibility of meeting space, the number of breakout rooms and audiovisual equipment. We have worked hard to foster relationships with hotel brands, and those relationships are such as to be an advantage for us."

Those relationships, Washburn said, often are centered on hotel brand salespeople specifically dedicated to fulfilling the needs of insurance meetings. Most large chains have such a department, given the high volume of corporate meetings and incentive typical insurance firms stage.

Internal meeting sponsors are under no obligation to choose one of the five destinations in the hotel program or use one of the preferred properties in those five cities, Washburn said, though the latter case is exceedingly rare.

"It's not a problem," she said. "Organizationally, there are sometimes gray areas. But in the mandate cities, 99 times out of 100, our preferred hotels offer the extra caliber of service that they would naturally want. It's common sense. Yet, if there's a business case, we will allow it in beyond rare cases."

Although pricing for guest rooms during meetings at preferred hotels can vary based on availability, Aon generally asks for and receives the same rates it pays for transient stays.

Meeting and group air travel fulfillment is handled through Carlson Wagonlit Travel, Aon's consolidated domestic agency, Washburn said. Aon's transient rates are used for meeting travel "99 percent of the time," she said.

Just last month, Aon introduced its meeting program in the United Kingdom, offering site selection and contract negotiation services at preferred properties, but assuring internal sponsors control of meeting content.