WWStay has added meetings to its portfolio of corporate housing and furnished apartment units available for booking. The new platform, WWMeetz, leverages WWStay's existing relationships with 140,000 properties across 170 countries. According to co-founder and CEO Rajeev Goswami, many of these properties are at least three-star and are meetings ready.
Like many emerging meetings management platforms, WWMeetz targets the industry's large number of small, unmanaged meetings. Unlike other platforms in this space, WWMeetz is not a self-service environment. The platform provides a sourcing service supported by a team of meetings professionals. Users enter their meeting requirements, and the meetings team returns selections from the WWStay network, offering side-by-side comparisons on factors like sleeping rooms, meeting rooms, rates, services and amenities. Goswami said WWMeetz also can pull in corporate preferred hotels from the global distribution system to meet customer requirements.
The internally developed platform goes beyond sourcing, however, with integrated payment capability and reporting. "Our focus is very simple: We want to provide an end-to-end experience to the customer," Goswami said.
Three WWStay clients—one in IT, one pharmaceutical company and one consulting company—tested the platform over the past seven months and provided feedback to help WWStay refine the WWMeetz offering. As a result, the company said, the platform can be customized, even for companies in highly regulated verticals like pharma or finance and particularly companies with high volumes of small meetings. "The idea is that with such large volume, we provide a team that works with technology to fulfill it very quickly," said Goswami. "[We find that customers] are happy to hand over everything to us and get all the things done: reporting, tracking, payments."
Even so, WWMeetz continues to work on a self-serve environment that Goswami said will roll out in 2020.