Web Site Offers Meeting Site Budgeting

<B> Web Site Offers Meeting Site Budgeting</B>

By Chris Davis

As Internet entrepreneurs continue to seek new ways to automate the meeting planning process, they have found a new avenue to explore: precise cost comparisons of potential meeting sites based on the origination points of the attendees.

Stepping on the toes of what traditionally has been a travel agency function, the new AllMeetings Web site (www.allmeetings.com) totals the airfare, hotel charges and ground transportation and meal costs of all attendees to determine which facilities offer buyers the best value for their dollar on a given event.

To use the site, planners input the number of attendees coming from each origination airport, and the starting date and length of the meeting. AllMeetings does the rest, calculating and listing the estimated cost of the meeting at each of the 4,000 properties included in the site's database, and coming up with an answer in about one minute.

The Henderson, Nev.-based Web site hosting company also has the ability to private label its technology for individual corporations. Under such a scenario, it would load its software onto the corporate intranet, incorporating all negotiated group rates.

AllMeetings charges no fee to users, but rather functions as a third party and retains a 10 percent commission on all meetings booked through its request-for-proposal functionality.

While the site breaks down its meeting budgets to the dollar, estimating travel costs is never an exact science. Airline rates are based on the lowest published advance purchase fares, and the hotels listed can access the site and change their listed fares whenever they choose, but there's no guarantee the information is the most current.

Nevertheless, the site may offer planners lower-cost hotel options they would not otherwise have considered. "It's an innovative product," said Fairfax, Va.-based technology consultant Doug Fox, publisher of the EventWeb newsletter (www.eventweb.com). "It's a good tool that in a very short period of time gives you ballpark-or-better inclusive costs by location, which I think is worthwhile information to have."

But Joan Eisenstodt, president of Washington, D.C.-based Eisenstodt Associates, expressed ambivalence over the lack of interaction the site allows. "I have mixed feelings about this," she said. "The technology is good and can work, but it just takes numbers and slots them in. The variations of who, what, where, how and in particular why aren't noted."

Eisenstodt cautioned that while using the site may save time in the short run, it deprives planners of the opportunity to gain experience in booking and negotiating and to establish relationships with suppliers, which might serve them better in the long term.

The founder and president of AllMeetings, though, stressed the site's value to corporate meeting buyers, particularly for small meetings and those planned in less centralized environments. "This is for 50 people coming in for a regional sales meeting and booking through their regular travel agent," said Glenn Bingham. "Our market is small business meetings, and we think this reflects the most accurate fares. There's not a tremendous amount of coordination involved in these meetings, and there's not 42 custom menus. It's usually just some sandwiches on a cart for lunch."

<B><CENTER>Making A Federal Case</CENTER></B>

Bingham has a history of travel software development, as president of Federal Software, which developed the Travel Manager expense reporting system used by many federal government planners. AllMeetings originally was designed for government groups, until its usefulness to the broader corporate market became obvious.

"The software is designed for a corporation to be able to input all of their office facilities and their hotel and air contracts," Bingham said. "They may find through our site that it's not always better to use a contracted facility. Someone could offer a special near where the attendees are from, and the hotel down the street might not be the best option."

For large corporations, AllMeetings soon will either private label the software to reside on a corporate intranet travel home page, or create a password-protected area on the AllMeetings.com site. Bingham is offering the software to interested corporations free of charge during the testing process.

The site works by "factoring in 100 different variables to determine the optimal place for meetings, comparing factors for several different modes of transportation," Bingham said. "We've tried to be extremely comprehensive, and we have a patent pending on the process because of the nature of the computation of the cost analysis."

Beyond air and hotel rates, the cost analysis includes such options as cab fares and public transportation to help planners decide whether to use rental cars or hotel shuttles. "It gives the manager the option to say one option is worse than another," Bingham said.

The next step for AllMeetings will be to incorporate group and meeting fares being offered by the airlines, instead of the public advance purchase fares. Also on the agenda is the hiring of a data-entry staff to ensure the integrity of the hotel rates, said marketing and sales director Brian Ashton.

Using the site, though, will require a change in the site-selection philosophy of most planners. "People will think about site selection differently," Bingham said. "Instead of starting out by deciding where to hold a meeting and then figure out who's coming, planners can figure out where their attendees are originating and then use the Web site to determine the best location."

Many travel agency meetings departments already provide a similar service to corporate groups.