Managing Meetings At: Zurich North America--Mtgs. Policy Links Transient Deals

A three-year implementation of an extensive meetings management strategy, centered around a new policy requiring central registration of events and the close alignment of site selection with existing transient deals, led commercial property casualty insurance provider Zurich North America to avoid or save more than $1 million in meetings expenditures last year. Schaumburg, Ill.-based Zurich N.A. accomplished this without instituting a true mandate, as there is no penalty for noncompliance, said global travel director Megan Carmody. Still, she said, 63 percent of all 2003 meetings expenditures appropriately were centralized and registered through the travel department.

Zurich N.A.'s meetings strategy is heavily procurement-based, with an emphasis on collecting spending data, exercising influence over vendor choice, aligning meeting and transient supplier strategies and centralizing contract signing authority. Carmody's department either allows internal meeting sponsors to retain some responsibility for planning event details or outsources those tasks to planners from its meetings management firm, American Express Meetings & Incentives.

Zurich N.A. has a large program, with $19 million in 2003 U.S. booked air volume and $7.6 million in 2003 non-air meetings volume. The company is a unit of a larger insurance and financial firm, Switzerland-based Zurich Financial Services, but the meetings program applies only to Zurich North America.

The company's meetings program is based on a policy that requires all events of at least 10 attendees that require a contract to be registered with Carmody's department and the use of an Amex meetings card for payment of all meetings expenditures. As all Zurich N.A. vendor payments must be submitted through an internal expense management system, noncompliance is not difficult to discover, Carmody said. "Our objectives are to make sure we are involved with the procurement of meetings-related expenses and to know what's being spent," she said.

Gaining access to that level of meetings volume has allowed Carmody to align meetings strategies around the firm's mandated agency, card and hotel programs. In particular, the company focuses on selecting meetings sites based on the air and hotel costs of existing transient deals. "We look for meetings destinations at locations where our corporate air contracts support and where we can apply our corporate discount," she said. In addition, Carmody included the firm's requirements for meetings in its most recent transient hotel requests for proposals in Schaumburg and negotiated deals based on the combined volume and guidelines. "This year, we'll expand that to other cities," Carmody said. "On the transient side, 10 cities house 80 percent of our hotel volume. We'll go down the list."

Additionally, consolidating meetings data has shown that the firm often holds meetings in particular cities—Las Vegas specifically—that are not among the firm's most used transient destinations, enabling additional deals to be negotiated.

Zurich N.A. also has promoted the use of its internal training facility at its headquarters. "We strongly suggest that but do not mandate it, and we can affect it to a large degree," she said. Though responsibility for management of the training facility is not in her department, it does fall under a larger corporate services umbrella, and Carmody has given planners the facility's schedule so the option can be presented to internal meeting sponsors.

Zurich N.A.'s program technically was founded about three years ago, at the behest of American Express, also the firm's consolidated domestic agency. After Amex's meetings division demonstrated potential savings through standard formulas, the firm decided to go ahead with the project and advance what was then a partially centralized program with two internal planners. "We had several conversations with internal stakeholders, CFOs, chief administrative officers of different business units and administrative assistants," Carmody said. "There was not a lot of visibility, and it was a slow climb to ramp it up. It was not mandated."

At the time, Zurich N.A.—a smaller firm then, with much less travel volume—heavily was focused on the implementation and adoption of Amex's CTO self-booking tool, with meetings management less of a priority. However, last year a companywide process improvement initiative that stressed savings via procurement strategy spurred the meetings program to new heights of visibility, Carmody said. Given employees' familiarity with mandated travel policy, compliance with the unmandated meetings policy was easier to attain. "There was a huge spike last year," she said. "The whole organization rallied to save this money. Though meetings were not specifically targeted, it stressed that everyone was accountable to contribute. We gained a lot of traction."

Measurement of expenditure and savings data is a key aspect of the program, including a monthly measurement of policy compliance. Though Zurich N.A. takes as a given that compliance automatically will lead to savings, that is measured as well. "We measure everything," Carmody said. "We measure savings, the achieved room rate and food and beverage costs."

Though Carmody continues to use Amex M&I formulas to help assess the state of the meetings program and has benchmarked her policy against those of other firms, she is trying to develop more comprehensive statistical data to judge the effectiveness of the initiative. "It's not like corporate travel, where there are so many benchmarks and you know what's being done well," Carmody said. "There is not the same relativity in meetings, but we are working with American Express to create them."