Convention Bureaus Target Small Corporate Meetings

<B> Convention Bureaus Target Small Corporate Meetings</B>

By Sarah Welt

Convention and Visitor Bureaus are taking advantage of an uptick in corporate business and getting more aggressive about reeling it in.

In the latest Business Travel News Meetings Monitor survey, 28.4 percent of the 188 planners said they used CVBs more in the past year than ever before, while only 5.5 percent said they turned to CVBs less often in planning their meetings.

At the same time, almost half--43.6 percent--said that they perceive the interest of CVBs in wooing corporate customers to have increased, while 49 percent said it stayed the same. Only 7.4 percent of respondents reported a decrease in convention bureau inquiries.

Susan Thompson, corporate meeting planner for McKesson Corp. in San Francisco, agreed she has "noticed in the last year or two that CVBs are marketing toward corporate meetings--especially small corporate meetings" with greater frequency. As a planner at a multinational organization, where keeping costs down is a big part of the equation, Thompson often is asked to identify the least expensive city that is centrally located for meeting attendees, she said. She, too, has increased her use of CVBs for meeting planning--"primarily because of their access to hotels and their information about a city."

In an age in which smaller staffs are doing more work, a CVB offers one-stop shopping and quick accessibility. It can offer up to date information on new and different hotels as well as data on the meetings destinations quickly, and via e-mail, she said.

At Stamford, Conn.-based paper company Champion International Corp., meeting planner Bettina Vaccaro agreed that CVBs have increased their aggressiveness about going after corporate business, and said she can understand why meeting planners would bite. Using a CVB is like a using brokerage house, she said: "You send them a request for proposals and they send it to their people. I needed help with a meeting in West Palm Beach, so I sent one set of specs to the CVB and they forwarded it to all their participating vendors."

Vaccaro definitely has noticed increased attention by CVBs to Champion meetings--she has gotten "quite a lot of calls I never got before"--and has seen more CVB advertising in industry newspapers as well.

As a result, "usage of CVBs at Champion has increased, and I am more prone to call a CVB than to pick up a hotel index and call randomly around," she said. "It's more of a reference point and cuts down on digging and scraping."

Even while agreeing that CVBs do seem more interested in corporate business, Laura Wolf, manager of meeting services and corporate activities at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc., noted that IEEE has not increased its CVB usage, "especially in smaller markets," and cited the traditional concern of planners.

"The problem with routing through CVBs is they often send a lead out to every property whether it meets my needs or not," she said. "If I have a high-end meeting, I still get faxes from the Comfort Inn. We used the Boston CVB to check space for a meeting in '99 which we booked, but now every Tom, Dick and Harry" sends her information she did not request.

Wolf did acknowledge that CVBs are getting more professional by "hiring more people with hotel experience." But, she added, "they are not there yet."

Like Wolf, Hewlett-Packard meetings program manager Richard Del Colle hasn't been wowed by CVBs. "I don't think they have done a good job getting the word out that they are willing to handle small corporate meetings," he said. "People out there don't know CVBs will take any size corporation."

Banking instead on the clout that comes from a $200 million annual meeting budget, Del Colle prefers to go direct to the H-P account managers at its preferred hotel chains, who "know the total value of our business to the chain."

But that's not to say that CVBs are not trying to get the word out that they are willing and able to help planners of smaller corporate meetings.

In Austin, Texas, CVB executive director Ric Luber said that corporate meetings, which traditionally "work on shorter time frames than associations," help fill gaps during slow periods. This year, for example, since "some major business has rotated out" and left a hole in the schedule in late fall, the CVB is planning a telephone blitz of the corporate market.

The Greater Boston Convention & Visitors Bureau has been expanding sales trips to more destinations and targeting new markets, like incentives and high-tech meetings. In the last two years, it also launched Meeting Pass, an online system that promotes the destination and includes a distribution system for electronic RFPs. "Planners can go to the Website (www.meetingpass.com) and search for suppliers, facilities or services depending on their criteria," said marketing vice president Leslie Hogan.

At the site, planners can pull together a list of hotels they would like to contact, "make that list into a distribution list for RFPs and send an online RFP." Launched last July, Meeting Pass has been visited by 730 planners and brought in about $5 million that "helped to fill in the short-term peaks and valleys in occupancy," Hogan said.

Even with its hotels running at record occupancy levels, the New York Convention & Visitors Bureau has upped its interest in the corporate market, and launched a department specifically for that niche. Called Conference Express, it is dedicated to meetings of 75 sleeping rooms or less.

NYCVB communication vice president Nell Barrett said demand for the program has increased so much that another staff member was brought on board this year. The CVB also has increased its attendance at trade shows to reach the corporate market.

When the new convention center in Philadelphia opened in 1993, meanwhile, the CVB took a different approach: it set up "congresses" of city boosters in distinct fields, like health care, dedicated to spreading the word about the new convention center to their own markets. Acting like customer advisory boards, the congresses "gave us the ability to have access to the people in these groups--and now a third of our business is from the health care industry," said CVB president Tom Muldoon.

With a sales force that consistently brings in 750 to 800,000 room nights worth of corporate meetings and conventions a year, the Philadelphia CVB has not been exhibiting at industry trade shows. It now, however, has seven hotels with 3,500 new rooms under construction in Center City. "For the year 2000, we'll be looking heavily to the corporate market," Muldoon said.