Buyers Meld Mtgs., Transient

During the National Business Travel Association annual convention last month in Dallas, BTN editors discussed the state of meetings management and its convergence with transient travel management with Sheri Bonsall, manager of corporate travel services for Chubb Group of Insurance Cos.; Terri Carlton, manager of meeting services and corporate travel for BlueCross BlueShield Association; Kari Knoll Kesler, ING Americas sourcing specialist for travel, meetings and promotions; Joni Miyashiro, Amgen Inc. travel program manager; and Tracey Wilt, Xerox Corp. purchasing consultant for travel and meeting services.

BTN: What initiatives are your companies currently undertaking in terms of meetings policy and structure?

Kari Knoll Kesler: We are in phase two of a meeting centralization initiative. Phase one consisted of establishing our first policy, in which we mandated the registration of all meetings if there are 15 attendees who require hotel room nights or airline tickets. We built a resource group of people in a virtual resource center for our planners to find what they have to do to comply with rules. We mandated that all contracts, regardless of numbers, come through my office for review and approval. There are more than 1,000 contracts. This has given us completely fabulous insight into our data, especially in the small-meeting category. We had no clue what was there. We also just sent out a bid for meetings technology and services support, and we're hoping to have one company automate a lot of the processes we do manually—registration, destination analysis and RFPs.

We're also streamlining a small-to- medium meetings strategy. For up to about 50 people, the site choices will be very limited—one of our three major locations with precontracted hotel packages. To deviate from that will require significant effort and approval. A lot of our savings goals are attached to that strategy.

Tracey Wilt: We have a similar phased approach. We began in 2000 with manual meetings registration. We did not care at what phase in the process the meeting planner was in, we just wanted to get our arms around the data. We started to baseline that data to understand it and, in 2001, with senior management support, we mandated the registration process and asked that they register the meeting with us before beginning any planning. We have a primary meeting location—a conference center we once owned and managed that has been sold—that every destination analysis is applied to.

There are cases when it doesn't make sense to have it there, but we have a meetings package there with a set rate that includes all meals, so we know what our costs are. Since we implemented that, we are seeing a 25 percent year-over-year reduction in cost per attendee. We're in the process of implementing end-to-end meetings technology that will take away a lot of the manual processes, like online attendee registration, and we want to integrate with our transient online booking tool. We are in process of contracting with two meetings management companies to support that.

Terri Carlton: I'm a little different, as our group is already centralized with all in-house and external meetings. I sign off on all contracts. If they don't have my signature, procurement will not process them. If someone tries to sneak a meeting through, when they try to pay the invoice, procurement will red flag it and tell me, and then I have to explain the policy to that person.

Before I took over the department about two years ago, the requesting department chairperson would sign contracts, but they did not understand the whole logistics of contracting. We have meetings policies in place: how they are handled, where they are handled. We have guidelines as to where you can and can't take meetings.

BTN: You handled meetings management before transient. How did transient fall under your control?

Carlton: My predecessor handled the travel agency, and she worked with the airlines and ticketing. When it started to get into online booking and getting rid of paper tickets, we realized someone had to control it. Nobody in finance wanted to do it, and they said, "Well, it's meetings, meetings should control it." That was about two years ago during a restructuring. That was right around the same time everything started to happen with 9/11. Everyone wanted to know what we could do to streamline processes and keep tabs on where our meetings and travelers are.

Joni Miyashiro: Our meetings consolidation at Amgen started in 1999. After doing quite a bit of internal campaigning and marketing, a new policy for hotel sourcing was introduced in December. What we have since seen is the exponential growth of meetings we knew were out there but outside the sales and marketing arena—a lot of research and development and finance meetings. We are using StarCite exclusively for site search selection and moving toward 100 percent registration through RegWeb. Through StarCite, we rolled out the Cliqbook online air application. We have that fulfilled through our transient agency, WorldTravel BTI, but we were really looking for ways to streamline the group air piece, which was quite cumbersome under our old configuration. So that has worked very nicely, and we finally have our arms around the group air piece.

Sheri Bonsall: We have fulfilled air since the beginning of time at Chubb. It was the other pieces of the pie that were pretty fragmented, so we just recently began some campaigning for more buy-in from planners and admins. We're working a lot more with marketing to support their large and visible meetings, and they're giving us more data, which is key for us to go to senior management and tell them we need some policies, as we do not have a specific mandate for groups. We are also evaluating online registration to overlay on top of our online booking tool and evaluating online purchasing of air and electronic fulfillment, which will be big cost savings.

BTN: What is the relationship between meetings and travel management at your company?

Miyashiro: We are trying to leverage our meetings and transient spend. We have open and very visible reporting as to where our meetings spend is going, but we have not gone so far as to mandate that meetings be placed at transient hotel properties. We have leveraged meetings spend when I do the transient RFP program. The meetings spend helps to leverage better rates on the transient side.

Wilt: We have a two-tiered hotel program that includes best values for primary and secondary hotels, and we try to leverage spend to move business into those best-value hotels. We try to pick meeting destinations that match our airline agreements. Wherever you can pull those two pieces of business together and leverage, it makes good business sense.

BTN: Are your suppliers interested in your specific ability to drive compliance?

Wilt: That is key, and it's one of their number-one questions. "Are employees going to get reimbursed if they go outside of policy? How much senior management support do you have?" If a meetings coordinator does not accept our destination analysis recommendation, he/she has to get an operations committee signature to have the meeting at that location. Once suppliers know that, they are more willing to talk about what they can do about our program. Also, if you have a very strong transient program and the suppliers know it, they know you're going to have better success being able to move group compliance.

Kesler: Now that we have a better idea of what our volume means, we are about to redo all of our airline contracts. "This is how much business I have to offer to be considered in the data analysis and negotiations." It will all be in one piece, and it's the first time we'll do it this way.

From a hotel perspective, we planted the seed last year by asking in the user-defined questions in the requests for proposals, "Will you extend that rate to groups and meetings?" When I was on the hotel side, we would never have been allowed to give our transient rate carte blanche for a year for meetings, but every single hotel I asked last year said yes. This year, we are specifically bidding for the right hotels in only the right locations, where we know we can channel volume. We need a transient bid and a package with a transient and meetings bid. I'm not mandating that the rate be exactly the same, but I'd like to let them sell me on why it can be different.

Wilt: There has to be a change in thought mechanism: It's not spend, it's moving marketshare. Everyone knows cost cuts are out there, and virtual meetings are out there. The ability to move marketshare is more important now than total spend, and suppliers are beginning to understand that.

Carlton: We're doing fewer meetings than we did three or four years ago, and some have been combined, so marketshare is very important. That's what we express to the airline too: "Don't tell me I have to do X million dollars of volume, tell me I have to do 80 percent." A lot of them are coming around to that.

Bonsall: Because it is something we're combining a lot more, and utilizing a lot more of our preferred hotels for meetings spend, we're getting a lot of partnering from our suppliers. They've been extremely cooperative, but we bring it together: It's what we spend on hotels, then it's how much is group and transient.

BTN: How has remote conferencing affected your meetings programs?

Wilt: We want people to consider what is the best mechanism for their meetings because of cost, including Webconferencing, audioconferencing, videoconferencing and broadcast. We've had kickoff meetings that, because of cost cutbacks, have been virtual, but they can still be very successful. We have a whole other organization that works on conferencing, but it is tied directly to our team that manages meetings.

Kesler: We have it in our policy that you have to consider onsite meetings and virtual meetings, but I don't think anyone is even reading that part of it right now. Yet, our meetings are growing because our company has been in an acquisition mode for the past 24 months—we were 37 companies a few years ago. I can foresee allowing people to take credit for making the determination, that instead of spending money on meeting face to face they held it virtually and saved money.

BTN: What meetings and transient program initiatives are next on your agendas?

Bonsall: I'm encouraged to see the gap bridging between the two areas and the natural progression to have travel and meetings together. At Chubb, we're definitely going down that road, trying to get more consolidation and making sure that we are seeking ways to save money without compromising attendees and travelers. It's such a high-profile area, and everyone is seeking alternatives to reduce costs.

Miyashiro: We have the American Express corporate card mandated on the transient side, and we have a meetings card piloted in certain parts of the company. We'd like more of a mandate in place for all of our meetings spend. A lot is still paid by invoice and check request. We want to get out of that business. There are still some reconciliation issues with the meetings card, but a lot are Amgen-systemic problems we need to fix. Then, we'll be in a better place to get total buy-in from planners to use the meetings card for everything.

Carlton: Right now, we're trying to move forward and work harder on the transient side. We're also looking at a meetings card. My planners are a little hesitant to use it because that means they have to reconcile it, and it's easier to hand out an invoice and say that it's accounting's problem. We find that hotels are more receptive to receiving cards as payment for meetings versus five years ago, when they charged fees.

Part two of the roundtable, in which the panel of buyers addresses outsourcing and benchmarking meetings programs, will appear in the Meetings Today section of the Sept. 22 issue of BTN.