Meeting Lead Times Hold The Long Course Into 1999
<B> Meeting Lead Times Hold The Long Course Into 1999</B>
By Chris Davis
While a healthy majority of corporate planners still report that they are planning more small meetings than large ones, they did not foresee a decrease in lead times in 1998. And they don't expect much of a change in lead times in 1999, according to the 213 corporate meetings buyers who responded to Meetings Today's monthly Meetings Monitor poll.
The average lead time for a meeting of less than 100 attendees was 83.4 days in 1998, a negligible increase from the 1997 average lead time of 82.1 days. Almost 75 percent of the planners surveyed said they expect their lead times for small meetings to remain about the same in the year ahead (see chart, page 17).
This result is rather surprising, since the trend over the past few years has been toward ever-shortening time frames. But meeting buyers indicated that the high hotel occupancy levels of the past year or two have made finding meeting space more of a challenge than in the past, even as the hospitality industry has been demanding stronger contracts--and putting some teeth behind its enforcement of cancellation fees.
While the seller's market may be begining to slip, the survey shows that isn't slicing lead times. Only 11.3 percent of those polled said they expect shorter lead times next year, while 14.2 percent said they expect even longer ones.
"I would say my lead times are getting longer, because we're in a tight hotel market right now, and I want to make sure that I get the property I want," said Julie Fosgate Heggli, vice president of marketing for Western National Warranty Corp. of Scottsdale, Ariz. Her lead times range from about four to eight weeks, and 90 percent of her meetings have less than 100 attendees. "I don't see the seller's market easing yet, and particularly not in the properties that I want," she said.
Among the planners in the survey, average lead times for meetings with fewer than 100 attendees most often--about 30 percent of the time--ranged between 31 and 60 days. A fifth of planners said their average lead time was between two weeks and 30 days, while 15.6 percent said their average was 61 to 90 days and 16.6 percent had a three- to six-month average.
Those numbers are very similar to the 1997 results, when a fourth of planners--25.5 percent--also said their average lead time for small meetings was between 31 and 60 days. In 1997, 24 percent of planners said their average lead time was between two weeks and 30 days, 15.5 percent said between 61 and 90 days and 18.5 percent said between three and six months.
"Our lead times are usually two months at the most," said Pamela Ryan, a corporate meeting planner with CCH Legal Information Services in New York, where 90 percent of the meetings are for groups of 100 or less. "Some meetings are set year to year, and so we always know about them and start to plan two months ahead, but recently there have been more last-minute meetings called. Some lead times have been shorter to a degree, because there are more meetings."
Many planners who are negotiating under shorter lead times agreed that an increase in the number of meetings being held is the major culprit. Kathy Kaskiw, senior consultant for meetings and incentives for Canada Life Assurance Co. of Toronto, for example, said her lead times average between one and two months and are getting shorter.
"There are more smaller meetings today--there are teams of people roving around meeting with employees rather than hauling everybody in for one large meeting," Kaskiw said. "It's a more economical way to communicate information and it's much more timely for the people you want to communicate with, since many employees simply don't have the time for a longer meeting at a company's headquarters."
Canada Life Assurance is "doing a lot more smaller meetings now," she said. "Communication is very critical in our industry, and as we try to be more responsive to an ever-widening distribution force, we're required to hold more meetings--and more meetings closer to where our distribution is located. People are taking these types of meetings out on the road more often rather than bringing everybody in to one place, so employees can understand what's new with the product and how to market it."
At Montpelier-based National Life of Vermont, director of travel and conferences Lynn Averill said her lead times are getting shorter because of internal forces rather than industry trends. "I feel that we used to have more lead time," she said. "We've had a turnover in management and a lot of uncertainty over the past year and a half, and it's had an effect."
Most planners surveyed--65.7 percent--reported that most of their meetings have fewer than 100 attendees. About 27.5 percent said that between 51 and 75 percent of their meetings fall into that category; 20.6 percent said between 76 and 90 percent were small meetings; and 17.6 percent said that more than 90 percent of their meetings were small.
On the flip side, 6.4 percent of corporate planners said less than 10 percent of their meetings have fewer than 100 attendees, while 9.8 percent said 10 to 25 percent were small and 18.1 percent said 26 to 50 percent could be so categorized.
Respondents planned an average of 38 meetings of under 100 attendees a year.