WTP Goes For Gold With Olympic Housing System

<H1>WTP Goes For Gold With Olympic Housing System</H1>by Lauren Bielski

<B>O</B>lympics travel services sponsor WorldTravel Partners is looking to equip corporations to consolidate far-flung, often hidden meetings data using the comprehensive system it integrated to manage housing and transportation for the Games.

WTP is seeking to supply solutions that will allow meeting departments to thoroughly track all of their costs, not just air volume. "Whether corporations want just the entire solution or one piece, we'll be happy to do business with them," said WTP executive vice president Danny Hood. "We just want to get the word out that the technology is finally here to support comprehensive information gathering."

The system used at the Olympics, operated by the year-old WorldTravel Meetings and Incentives division, fulfilled more than 20,000 orders in Atlanta and featured a two-way flow of data from the CRS to the housing and ground transportation program, allowing a common client record to be initiated from the airline or hotel reservation. It was set up to receive faxed registration forms that were then scanned and routed to the CRS and housing system.

While WTP has offered solutions for meeting management as a third-party vendor-including Meeting Partner and Planning Partner-since the company was founded in 1987, the software was geared primarily to agencies and meeting management companies, explained director of marketing Betsy Brannen. In addition, the systems have never been able to work on an entirely integrated basis until this year, nor was the Meeting Partner component as user friendly.

Meeting Partner, a suite of products designed to manage housing, ground services and registration, also can be used by corporate planners to track the agendas of individual employees attending an internal meeting. Planning Partner, a planning and budgeting tool, is oriented more toward the corporate meetings market.

"We have developed easier-to-use versions of the software that can be used by meeting managers themselves," Brannen said. Corporations that have the budget to house a full-time support staff can opt to have the complete system installed, although WTP also will offer remote access to systems that it maintains in Atlanta.

WTP also will sell a Web-based product called Meeting- Assist, scheduled for release in January, that will be available on both the Internet and a company's intranet. Targeted toward less experienced planners in a decentralized environment, the product will allow users to register their meeting from their own PC. "This way, the data will be captured so the meeting or travel department within the organization can leverage their volume," Hood said.

The product will generate hotel usage and exception reports and feature a database (derived from WTP's own preferred vendor list and customized for each corporate account) of hotels and the corporate and meeting rates the company has negotiated. "We will also provide an on-line MeetingHelper for negotiating tips and room set-ups," said Hood.

Hewlett-Packard has expressed interest in purchasing MeetingAssist, which had taken a different approach than the in-house solution it was in the midst of developing.

WTP is betting that a soft sell, with many options as to how technology is supported, will put the $500 million agency further in the black. "The wave of meetings consolidations is finally coming," said Hood, who added that the company will be more aggressive in its marketing efforts to sell meetings management software independent of the contract to implement a meeting program. "We want to be flexible in the range of solutions that we can offer clients," he said. "One of our goals is to provide technology that can stand alone. We want corporate planners to get their hands on it, and we don't want to limit ourselves to on-site arrangements."

"We've always had really terrific meeting technology, and a traditionally strong meeting and incentive management company," said Kaye Mulceen, executive vice president of WT Meetings and Incentives. "We're looking for ways to pull some of this expertise together and combine it in ways that allow us to better service clients."

The WT team will be seasoned enough to support an influx of corporate meeting accounts. Currently, WT Meetings and Incentives handles meetings for Harbinger, BellSouth, Motorola, Levi Strauss and Colonial Life, an insurance company in South Carolina.

Although the game plan is for full-service meetings management to be the company's bread and butter, there was the none-too-small matter of the Olympic housing project to complete before the company could intensify its marketing efforts to aggressively compete in the meeting management market.

"At the Olympics, our integrated suite of scanning software, Meeting Partner operations software and our CRS link to Worldspan enabled us to process thousands of air, hotel and ground transportation reservations on an automated basis," Mulceen said. "We managed the daily activities of over 12,000 corporate VIPs, and this speaks well to our ability to equip a corporation to manage its own meetings business.