Agencies See Meetings Growth

<B> Agencies See Meetings Growth</B>

By Chris Davis

While mega travel agencies report a recent upswing in the number of corporate clients consolidating their meetings program, the increase may not completely represent the high level of interest in consolidation.

The disparity can be attributed to several factors, not the least of which is the lack of a singular and unified meetings services departments in the vast majority of corporations.

Nevertheless, as corporate buyers continue to explore the financial and logistical benefits of meetings consolidation, the megas have seen an increase in business and clients. As a result, they report they're working on new programs and initiatives to help streamline the process.

"The reason for the upswing for most businesses is that they need to stick with their core business, which is not meeting planning or planning group travel, it's whatever their industry or business happens to be," said Nancy Metzger, senior director of purchasing and onsite development for the Carlson Marketing Group. "They need to spend their time, money and energy doing their core business or core competency and leave the other things to the experts."

"We've seen a lot of growth in interest in meetings consolidation, but I'm still not convinced it's being accomplished," said Bill DeRoze, vice president for business development at Maritz Travel Co. in Fenton, Mo. "It's not because there aren't good people looking at it, but because it's a difficult thing to do politically and functionally. But there's an increased interest over the past year. A lot of people are looking to get control over the money they're spending on meetings."

Some of the barriers that prevent a corporation from consolidating meetings to the desired extent are due to factors within the company.

"There arer multiple owners of these meetings internally," DeRoze said. "Sometimes people feel that they need to handle their own meeting, because it's critical to the success of their own individual department and can't be mixed in with other people's meetings or put under a policy that would inhibit that. In other cases, people who have been planning other meetings in the past feel threatened because this is something they've done, something they enjoy doing and feel is part of the job. Some would prefer not having another department instruct or suggest to them that there's a better way of doing it. It becomes something of a turf issue.

"I'm not saying there's not some action, but there's not a lot of our clients who are where they want to be just yet."

The internal corporate reaction to meetings services consolidation, though, swings both ways. While it is true that, in some cases, internal factors can inhibit maximizing the potential of consolidation, enlarging the circle of employees involved in the process also can provide for more efficient and cost-effective forms of consolidation.

"Some companies are getting smart about the way they're approaching the consolidation in that they're doing their due diligence internally first," said Kaye Mulkeen, chief operating officer of meetings and incentives for WorldTravel Partners. "They're forming task forces or teams to look at what's going to be the best method for their particular culture.

"Years ago, when companies tried to consolidate their meetings the decisions on how to do so were made from a purchasing or finance perspective. They never got the buy-in from the sales and marketing teams or the meeting hosts, so there was great initiative but not a lot of success. Now that corporations are forming teams, they will have a buy-in at all levels. There's been tremendous growth over the past 10 years."

As corporations have widely varying internal structures that can promote or inhibit the success of a meetings consolidation, so too do the manners in which consolidation need to be implemented, primarily due to varying scopes of meeting or incentive programs. The megas look to develop flexible services to meet the differing requirements.

"We've designed a multitude of service configurations that are customer-driven," Mulkeen said. "We could have people servicing a customer on-site for meetings, maybe putting together simple meetings programs in a local market and then having complex meetings serviced from a headquarters location. Or we've had situations where there's a multitude of vendors working with a company, as well as their own in-house planners. WorldTravel would then be responsible for consolidating all of the data for the corporation."

In making the case to corporate clients about pursuing meetings services consolidation, Carlson's Metzger said,"We will do all the legwork for them and we have tremendous buying power because of who we are, so that's going to save them some money. The value we bring is the ability to manage all components of their business meetings and meeting needs, managing their people and registration. We have the capabilities and facilities to do total meeting management, and track revenues with suppliers to provide consolidated billing and show where to save money."

"A classic example would be if we'd already been handling their corporate business," said Louise Hall Reider, senior director of meeting and incentive management at BTI Americas. "The relationship managers of our corporate travel accounts--we put a lot on them--would go to a corporate client and help to look at the big picture. We would study and analyze their trends, and for example, show that they're spending a lot over here, but show the slippage in the meetings and incentives direction. They may not be capturing a lot and not leveraging what they should be leveraging. We assess what a client really needs and then find a solution within our family or through outsourcing."

Last year, BTI Americas split its meetings and incentives program into two separate entities, one focusing on consolidated meetings and the other geared towards customized meetings and incentives. That switch, prompted by the agency's mergers and acquisitions over the last few years--including the merger of USTravel and IVI that formed BTI Americas--has resulted in a smoother program, Hall Reider said.

"IVI was famous for being a pioneer in the consolidated meetings process and to those of us who were on the other side of the business, operating like an incentive house, it was a learning curve," she said. "The first couple of years, we tried to make it all work under one big happy family for meetings and incentive management and it just didn't work. We realized that we weren't meeting the needs of our clients because we were trying to be everything to everybody. We decided not to force something that's not an organic growth, and to look at what we do best and separate the organizations."

Meetings services consolidation, though, is not a panacea for every business. "We use a travel agency to do our rooming lists and our airline flights," said Jan Gordon, vice president of meetings and special services for Financial Network Investment Corp. "But we do a lot of other services ourselves. I think we still end up getting a better product if we do it ourselves, and you don't spend as much money."

Diane Baumann, travel program manager for Informix Software, said her corporation also does not consolidate through any travel agency. "The air is done through our agency, but we do the meetings aspect in-house because we have staff," she said.

Others look to consolidate, but not necessarily through an agency. "We are looking to consolidate all our meeting services, but through our meeting planning group here,'' said Amgen's Betsy Bondurant, who manages the corporation's meeting and trade show organization. "Then we would use outside vendors as appropriate, but we probably would not funnel all of our meetings through one particular organization."

Nevertheless, the megas said new programs, services and technologies are being developed--though they declined to release details--to meet the needs of what they feel is a growing move toward further consolidation.

"What we've been concentrating our efforts on is the consulting avenue, because everyone's a winner in that approach, and not all that many people are doing it in the full scale that we are," BTI's Hall Reider said. "We're continuously looking at ways to upgrade and new approaches in technology, including Website registration, which has been a big focus for us as well."

"We have continued emphasis, which we think is new to the industry, on managing the total portfolio of a customer's travel business," Maritz' DeRoze said. "That includes corporate travel, high-end incentives or premium care, and it includes what I call value meetings, which fall between corporate travel and the incentive side. We can assist the customer in managing its entire portfolio, eventually, as one entity or one total spend, as opposed to three or four or five or six separate functions.