Delta Introduces Delta Edge Meetings

Delta Air Lines will roll out a new facet of its Delta Edge program on Aug. 1. Called Delta Edge Meetings, the program will allow corporate clients both to associate meetings spend with their overall transient spend as part of their total volume and to isolate meetings spend from transient travel spend within Delta Edge reporting. This makes it easier for client corporations to calculate the impact of Delta air travel costs on the value of their meetings. Beyond reporting, Delta Edge Meetings will ensure Delta Edge corporate benefits like priority boarding and preferred seating and other inclusions extend to meeting travelers.

"Since our merger with Northwest Airlines, we've had a very large department that deals directly with meetings: association, corporate, you name it," said Delta vice president of global sales Bob Somers. But for many companies, especially those that do not have corporate travel management or travel procurement staff involved with meetings, individual event contracts do not necessarily dovetail with overall corporate transient travel contracts. The often-fragmented nature of the meeting planning function within an organization can result in lost travel data that should contribute to a corporation's overall travel volume. On the flip side, some organizations leverage the existing corporate contract for meetings travel but fail to get the benefits that a unique meetings contract can provide. According to Somers, Delta Edge Meetings represents the first time an airline has provided a solution for that dilemma.

"Very clearly through the course of our client interactions, they told us we had to attack meetings and that no one had really addressed that yet," he said. "Whether [corporate travel buyers] owned meetings or not, they asked us for a solution that they could display to their organizations so anyone with a meeting planning function could take advantage of it."

Delta Edge Meetings is built into the Delta Edge corporate solution as part of an overall corporate contract. The program automatically provides corporate clients with Delta's best available pricing by comparing Delta Edge Meetings discounts with the company's corporate sales agreement discounts. Under Delta Edge Meetings, meetings travel counts toward fulfillment of the targets under the customer's corporate sales agreement. Additionally, all the corporate preferred benefits like priority boarding, preferred seating and preferred rebooking during trip disruptions extend to meeting travelers, who in some circumstances may not otherwise travel for business or have loyalty status with Delta.

Jennie Ho, managing director of specialty and Canadian sales, spearheaded the program's development. She told BTN Delta piloted the program with approximately a dozen companies and that once a meeting is registered with Delta, travelers continue to book through their designated corporate travel channels. "We use a [meeting] identification code, travel dates and destination in the reservation record to identify corporate meeting traffic," she said.

Somers added that in the past, the meeting identifier code and the ticket designator code that identified the traveler's company were not associated with one another. "It required some significant investments, but we figured out how to blend them and build in more simplicity for the travel manager."

From a reporting standpoint, Delta will track meetings travel with the same granularity as transient travel. That includes the "beyond contract value" associated with the corporate preferred benefits. Travel and meeting managers will be able to view air spend in multiple ways: associated with individual meetings, meetings spend as a bundle or combined with transient spend.

"What we are hoping to do is to encourage travel buyers who are not controlling meetings to start. It's in their best interest to capture more of the travel and more of the spend," said Somers. It's in Delta's best interest to capture that, as well.

Asked whether corporations would shift more meetings share over to Delta based on the program, he said, "The trend is toward consolidation with meetings, so we think we are hitting the market at the right time. We built Delta Edge Meetings in collaboration with our clients and with agencies that need to serve our clients."