MeetingTrak Meets The CRS

<H1> MeetingTrak Meets The CRS</H1>By Cheryl Rosen

P</B>erhaps taking a cue from the stream of technology partnerships being forged in the transient travel arena, super-regional travel agency TravelOne and meetings technology developer Phoenix Solutions have formed a meeting software alliance of their own.

Under the terms of a pact agreed upon at the National Business Travel Association conference, the two will merge their respective travel, expense reporting and meeting management software into a single seamless system for corporate meeting managers.

In a non-exclusive alliance, the two companies will develop links to pull together information from TravelOne's MeetingOne and ExpenseOne databases, and combine it with meeting registration data in Phoenix Solutions' popular MeetingTrak software.

Travel and meeting managers who have the system at their desktops can then run reports comparing rooming lists, room blocks and session registrations with actual reservations made, download information from the CRS and pull in individual attendees' expense reporting data to get a total of all meeting expenditures.

Bob Walters, president of Fremont, Calif.-based Phoenix Solutions, said he expects to ink several such alliances, with mega as well as regional agencies, by the end of this year. MeetingTrak, on the market since 1983, has sold 1,600 copies to corporate, association and independent planners, Walters said, and in the past two years has seen "a huge increase in the number of agencies" buying the product-including TravelOne. The company's three software products-MeetingTrak, EventManager and MemberTrak (for association managers)-brought in sales of $1.1 million in 1995, and are on track to reach $1.5 million in 1996.

The alliance of the software developer and the Mt. Laurel, N.J.-based corporate agency comes as good news to B. J. Bruck, meetings and corporate travel manager at Astra/Merck Group, a division of pharmaceutical giant Merck & Co. in Wayne, Pa. Bruck is first in line to get the new system and plans to roll it out on 12 planners' desktops by the end of this month.

"As a manager of corporate as well as group travel, I'm excited about having something that ties together all the systems-the meeting registration, the air and hotel reservations, and the accounting and expense reporting," Bruck said. "Having the meeting rooming lists running against reservations made in the CRS gives us better control over room deviations, where the airline reservation says one thing and the hotel reservation says another thing-such as when attendees are coming into a meeting early for vacation or to stay with relatives. When we do meetings over 1,000, finding those discrepancies is very laborious."

Equally important is the connection between the meeting system and Astra/Merck's internal accounting systems, Bruck added. "Not only will the system download all the centrally billed meeting charges directly into accounting, but it will also pull in expenses like additional meals that attendees have charged to their individual expense reports. That will allow me to track the actual totals daily against my budget, and also allow us to track everything we bring into the hotel, and use that figure to negotiate the next time."

That total-spend figure should prove a real boon to negotiations for the annual company meeting, where Bruck often "buys out" a hotel's room inventory-and tends to pay extra for the privilege. In general, she said, "hotels figure they are losing restaurant revenue on groups, because they assume attendees will not eat dinner at the property. But I know that we offer a lot of free nights at our annual meeting, and that our attendees do tend to utilize outlets in the hotel for dinner."

Following this year's meeting, where she has taken 1,400 rooms at the Westin Bonaventure in Los Angeles, Bruck should be able to pull in individual travelers' expense report data to prove that-and use the figure to negotiate next year's contract, she said.

Also in her game plan for the future is using the system to send rooming lists to hotel partners electronically, "to preclude typographical errors and to automatically QC the hotel's lists against ours." Astra/Merck is already exchanging rooming lists with Hyatt properties on disk, she said, "and that's where I see technology going in the future. That's what's really exciting."

Jay Roseman, TravelOne's meetings and incentives vice president, said he hopes to add the capability to transfer rooming lists over the Internet by the end of the year.

TravelOne will be marketing the system to customers as well as to outside accounts, Roseman said. Although MeetingOne is newly available to meeting managers, it has been used internally by TravelOne since January 1995.

"We use it for every single meeting we plan-for air arrival and departure lists, for rooming lists, for meeting sessions," Roseman said. "I can dial it and get information on any meeting we are planning for any customer anywhere in the world. Our planners zip it down to laptops when they go on-site with a meeting, so they have the whole database, and continually modify the rooming and arrival and departure lists, so they can run clean, updated lists every day."

For customers like Bruck, he said, TravelOne used the system not only to track vendor information like hotel spending, transportation and A/V, but also pulled reports of her daily attendance patterns at last year's annual meeting so it could set room blocks this year.

The list price of the MeetingTrak software is $2,995, plus $495 per each additional user. TravelOne has not yet put a price on the enhancements and linkages it plans to add, because everything is customized to each customer, Roseman said.

As a TravelOne customer and beta-test site, Astra/Merck will not initially be charged for the system, although Bruck expects there will be some cost eventually. But because her relationship with TravelOne involves "putting all the costs and all the revenues of our travel program into a bucket that we share," automating meeting planning should in the long run "save staffing for them, and money for us," she said.