The merger between The Active Network's Business Solutions
division with hospitality technology provider Lanyon, announced last week,
will enable the new company to offer tools that help buyers determine
per-attendee and per-traveler costs for transient travel and meetings,
officials said.
Operating under the name Lanyon, the organization was formed
when The Active Network shed its Business Solutions division, which includes
the company's strategic meetings management offerings and what was known as its
StarCite technology platform, to merge with Lanyon. The new Lanyon will provide
buyers with "a holistic view of all travel expenses for the year,"
according to JR Sherman, president and chief revenue officer of
the new Lanyon.
"We spend a lot of time with travel buyers, and one of
the biggest metrics they look at is total cost of attendee or traveler as a key
indicator of how they're performing," added Anthony Miller, the new Lanyon's senior vice president of strategy and product management.
"We believe that single metric is made more possible by understanding the
holistic view of spend."
Lanyon plans to move forward with Active Network
Business Solutions' flagship product, the Smart Events Cloud, which will
be "very complementary within the original Lanyon toolset," said
Miller. "Customers that exist today that use
StarCite will migrate into the Smart Events Cloud, and in addition they'll be
able to use the Lanyon toolset, which over time will become a part of the Smart
Events Cloud." Pricing for the SMM products will remain roughly the same,
he said.
By incorporating some of the old Lanyon's
meeting audit tools, the new company will better help buyers avoid risk like
noncompliance to meetings spending guidelines and industry and government
regulations, officials said. Meeting managers also can use the platform to more
easily document the economic value of their meetings, they said.
Neither Lanyon nor Active Network
Business Solutions expect to downsize during the merger, and the technological integration
ahead will be easier since Active moved to a cloud-based platform, they said.
There is some overlap between Active
Business Solutions' and Lanyon's customer bases—Lanyon's customers include more
than 900 corporations and 350 hospitality brands representing more than 98,000
properties—and the new company will take advantage of the combination.
"The merger allows suppliers,
whether transient travel or meetings and events, to reach a broader platform of
customers," said Kenny Cobern, former CEO of Lanyon, who assumes the role
of COO at the new Lanyon. "Here you have another tool with another set of
data and another ability to reach customers."
Lanyon does not anticipate naming a new
CEO, Sherman said.