<B>CTW Attendees Talk Meetings.</B>
Reflecting a growing emphasis on managing meetings expenditures among corporate travel managers, meetings negotiations and technology took a fair amount of the spotlight at last month's Corporate Travel World conference and trade show in New York City.
After a year and a half of negotiations, Sam Gonzalez--the project manager at Goldman, Sachs & Co. who is responsible for meetings--now has a standard meetings contract with a single hotel chain, covering all discounts. Though he declined to name the brand during a discussion on the pros and cons of consolidating meetings and transient travel in the "Meetings and Corporate Travel, Synergies and Singularities" session, Gonzalez said it was the hotel chain's first such contract.
Giving more kudos to his department, which handles about 300 meetings per year, Gonzalez noted another benefit to separate operations: Though Goldman, Sachs' meetings are not mandated, 70 percent to 80 percent of the volume is captured.
On the consolidated side, George Odom, manager of travel services and corporate meeting services at Eli Lilly & Co., listed several stumbling blocks to merging the travel and meetings departments. Most important, he stressed, is that attitudes must be overcome. Because travel negotiates very aggressively, "meetings departments believe travel will come in and negotiate away all the service benefits that contribute to the success of the meeting," he said.
Susan Finkbeiner, vice president and manager of travel services at Goldman, Sachs & Co., and Gonzalez agreed, noting that saving money is the bottom line for internal travel, but the company is not looking to cut costs for high-profile meetings--it is more concerned with ensuring the success of the meeting.
Another problem, Finkbeiner said, is that transient volume rates are negotiated "significantly" lower than group rates. While she negotiates rates with preferred hotels, meetings "can't touch those rates," so Goldman, Sachs is actively trying to leverage transient for groups. Finkbeiner added that hotels used for groups typically are not used for transient, so her contacts often are different than Gonzalez's.
Odom, meanwhile, uses the same hotels for transient and meetings. He has a standardized contract and negotiated flat rates for both. <P align=center>* * *</P>
Small, short-term corporate meetings business is increasing by the day, said Marietta Baldwin, Starwood's vice president of sales operation and development. Baldwin noted that 10 percent of Starwood's total room nights in 1999 were due to meetings of 150 people or less, which averaged 50 to 75 days of lead time. Of that total, 30 percent were booked and consumed in less than 30 days, a number that has increased to 35 percent in January and February 2000 (Meetings Today, March 20). "We were surprised at all those numbers," said Baldwin at a CTW panel on short-term meetings.
Less surprised was Michele Rubin, director of San Clemente, Calif.-based meetings management firm DRS3. "It's the nature of the business--if you can do it in 14 days, we're expected to do it again in 10," she said. While the panelists--Baldwin, Rubin and Carol Muldoon, director of meeting services at Montvale, N.J.-based KPMG--agreed that working with hotel chains' national sales offices were the best way to combat the short-term crunch, Baldwin disagreed with the notion that short-term negotiating automatically gives the advantage to the hotel.
"If it's real short-term, a hotel might be delighted to give you that space, though there are times where you will pay a premium," Baldwin said. "But be open with the national sales office if rate is an issue. You'll have a better chance of securing the dates and rates you need and the sales office can do a more efficient job of clarifying your options." <P align=center>* * *</P>
The industry's leading meeting Web sites gathered at a session called "Web Slinging for Meeting Planners" to compare their wares and reveal some numbers that indicate their usage so far by corporate meeting buyers.
AllMeetings.com CEO Glenn Bingham said 150 corporate planners had booked through his company's site; EventSource.com has been used to book 250 meetings, said CEO Ed Sarraille; PlanSoft claims 4,000 corporate users, said president Ed Tromczynski and StarCite.com is building 200 custom sites for corporations, said vice president of marketing Tom Flanagan. Registration and housing site b-there.com has been used for 400 events and 225,000 registrations, said industry vice president Karen Vogel.