WorldTravel Meetings & Incentives recently hired an industry veteran to lead an aggressive push of its Plan2Attend tool as a stand-alone product and manage P2A's new online purchasing tool. The expansion drive is the latest in a string of major changes within the meetings technology industry, including a two-year wave of mergers and acquisitions
(Meetings Today, Sept. 20) and a recent product consolidation at the former employer of WTMI's newest executive.
Mike Malinchok, WTMI's new vice president of meetings technology, took over Plan2Attend in the beginning of October. Malinchok previously headed a similar product, DirectMeetings, for Sabre Holdings' GetThere subsidiary. In August, GetThere stopped selling DirectMeetings as separate technology and included it as feature of their online booking tool
(Meetings Today, Aug. 2).At WTMI, the meetings management arm of WorldTravel BTI, the situation is reversed. Malinchok said his role is to manage the development and strategic planning for Plan2Attend, the meetings management tool WTMI launched in 2003
(Meetings Today, March 24, 2003). Plan2Attend includes three planning modules: meetings management, attendee management and planning and purchasing. Each can be purchased separately or as a package.
"Based on the feedback from our customers what we've seen on the marketplace, we've made the decision to take the product and go forward with moving it out as a stand-alone technology product," Malinchok said.
WTMI in August 2003 released the planning and purchasing module. The firm delayed its release to see how customers received the other two modules.
"Planning and purchasing are really the guts of a strategic meetings management program. This is the area where companies can get a hold on what the actual spend is that they're putting through the system in the course of six months or a year," Malinchok said.
When WTMI first released the planning and purchasing module, about 50 percent of clients using the attendee or meeting management module added on the new product, Malinchok said. He estimated that adoption of the new module now has grown to 75 percent to 80 percent. "More and more corporations are focusing on driving cost savings, collecting data, creating an understanding of how much they are spending within their company, so that is definitely becoming part of what I would say is the standard implementation," Malinchok said.
Malinchok said there are three aspects of Plan2Attend on which he will concentrate in the coming months: online corporate travel booking, e-procurement and continued enhancement of strategic meeting management tools. WTMI already has put an integration agreement in place with Outtask's Cliqbook online booking tool, and Malinchok said he is in the process of shoring up additional relationships with two "major" online corporate booking tools. "I can't confirm them yet, because we are still in the dialogue stage, but if you look at my history you can probably guess where one of those is," he said. His longtime employer, GetThere, offers an online procurement tool called DirectCorporate.
Malinchok said he also would focus on continuing to develop Plan2Attend's two-way global distribution system interface with Sabre, Apollo and Worldspan
(Meetings Today, March 23, 2003). The system creates a shell passenger name record to allow faster online booking.
"Focusing on better ways to manage this group travel in both an online and an offline environment is one area that we're going to put a lot of our resources on, because that is where our customers are going to see an immediate return on investment," Malinchok said. "That's where they're going to see the immediate cost savings from the first attendee traveler."
In e-procurement, Malinchok said he will focus on creating a fully automated and streamlined process for customers. He said many of the tools on the market today are little more than online databases of hotels with manual request for proposals processes. "What we're going to focus a lot of our effort on is how we take that model and truly mechanize and streamline it, not recreate a traditional model," he said.
Malinchok said he will aim WTMI's development resources toward driving continued enhancements to make its meetings management tools more focused and flexible.
In September, WTMI rolled out enhancements to Plan2Attend's user interface, giving the system a new look and a 30 percent reduction in clicks. The changes were based on customer feedback and Malinchok said they made the system more efficient and streamlined.
WTMI also plans to create a Plan2Attend customer advisory board. While Malinchok said that wasn't earth-shattering news in itself, "this is a group of customers that are going to be working with us on a monthly basis to help us prioritize enhancement, help us prioritize the direction of the product, to really give us pretty intense, specific feedback on enhancements that we are looking to build into the product."
Malinchok said the flexibility and modularized approach gives customers the option of choosing what they want, when they need it. "We recognize that not every company is ready to take on an entire consolidation and needs a three-module technology product," he said. "They kind of want to take it in steps."
Malinchok said he enjoys working in a corporate environment that "lives, breathes, sleeps and dreams meetings" and is funneling that into a technology program. "This is a product that has been built out of a meeting and event management company," he said.