Stevens Opens Meeting Div.

<H1> Stevens Opens Meeting Div.</H1>By Stefani C. O'Connor

<B>S</B>tevens Travel Management has started a meetings and incentive division that it expects to help drive its bottom line in the years ahead.

The department, called General Sessions, was organized by six former employees of Carrier Management Services and is being led by Ann Ford and Murray Braver, who are serving as co-directors. Ford handles corporate planning of all programs; Braver manages group air travel.

Helping to enhance the union is the expected midsummer introduction of tracking and scheduling software being developed for General Sessions by Stevens' technology partner, Insight Data Corp. of Ft. Collins, Colo.

Although the 25-year-old agency already had a group travel division, company president Harold Stevens said that, while each division will market to its own accounts, he recognized the potential the meetings side offered and the synergies upon which each entity could draw.

"Among the things we spoke about was giving the meetings division access not only to my accounts, but getting involved in other thrusts and other parts of the business community that can use what they do," he said. "Most of our accounts are under $1 million, but we give them all the services that a major account would get. Going into the meetings business provides a service to my existing accounts."

At present, Stevens is doing "a shade under $100 million" in corporate travel, with $7 million coming from the leisure side. Some $5 million to $7 million is being generated between the group travel and General Sessions divisions, Stevens estimated, and he is "looking to double or triple" that figure within the next three years.

Ford said the new division is handling about 50 groups through November, many of them clients that have chosen to follow her from Carrier. The bulk of the meetings business are major pharmaceutical companies, as well as cosmetics companies and financial concerns. The department also recently began handling meetings for a TV network and a few entertainment companies.

Ford said she has seen an upswing in meetings being outsourced, with the average spend by a pharmaceutical company at about $500,000. She finds, however, that most companies "want to do what they were doing two years ago for the same price," and in some cases, are consolidating meetings to save money.

For instance, "I'm now doing one meeting that used to be three for separate divisions," she said. "The company saw they had a tremendous crossover of clients who were attending each of these meetings at different times. Not only could they save money if they had a one-shot deal, but they could have a more interesting venue."

Avoiding repetition as a cost-containment measure also is the impetus behind the new meetings software that Insight Data is developing for Stevens. According to Robert Elliott, a systems analyst at Insight, the program will streamline General Sessions' operations, allowing the company to track information such as attendees' arrival and departure dates, what hotels people are staying in and which seminars and activities they are participating in. "They'll be able to use it across any kind of event," Elliott said. "There will be a basic profile, the company will set up one event, and then they can use that same event outline over and over again."

Elliott noted that one of the key features of the technology, which he expected to be in beta test at Stevens by May, is the program's spin on standard reports. Planners will be able to customize their own reports by choosing the information that they want to display; that data will be tied into Stevens' CRS, Worldspan, so that planners don't have to input hotel and air information. "We'll have a hook in the CRS that will pull down the air and hotel information right into our product, so there will be no dual entry," Elliott said.

"We think it's going to be unique," said Ford. "It's going to make us that much more efficient because if you make a change on arrival or departure, it's automatically going to update everything we know about. If the hotel is going to change, you're going to have to go through this script again to make these changes, but there's very little that can fall through the cracks. This piece of software just scans the system and updates all our reporting."

"This is a working, seamless system," said Stevens. "I see what everybody is going to have in 1996 and 1997; our stuff has been working for many years, but we haven't done a lot of promotion. We've spent our money in building software from front to back, and that's given us a big advantage.