Groupize debuted at the Association of Corporate Travel Executive's 2018 Montreal Global
Summit & Corporate Lodging Forum conference this week an enhanced capability that will allow meeting and travel managers to pool their resources with transient and simple meetings spend. The new capability, which the company describes as "Hotel Curation" and "Meeting Packages" technology expands the configuration options of two major content groups.
While Groupize already was pulling in negotiated rates for its partners from global distribution systems, Hotel Curation now allows those discounted transient rates and preferred properties to be highlighted in the tool. Very importantly, the tool also allows administrative users to load their preferred meeting hotels into the tool and display all those options side by side. Hotel Curation can deactivate hotel properties among the 150,000 choices that Groupize pulls in from the GDS, turning off economy-level or other properties that the corporate client deems unsuitable.
Meetings Packages technology builds on the preferred meetings hotel category, allowing program administrators to configure set meeting parameters for simple meetings along with pre-negotiated terms and conditions so that ad hoc and simple meetings planners need not negotiate for their simple programs. Rather, the concept is an "availability request" to the property with per person costs that are basically established upfront.
Groupize CEO Charles de Gaspe Beaubien compared it to Europe's very common "daily delegate rate," which many hotels offer as a standard across the European meetings industry. "We had a lot of demand for that capability—for companies to be able to establish their own daily delegate rates—so we delivered."
De Gaspe Beaubien also drove home the idea that combining transient and meetings preferred properties in one system and allowing bookings for both begins the process of tying together travel and meetings programs by giving insights into how many simple meetings are planned at preferred transient properties and giving an overall view of where business is booked.
"These tools enhance the corporate's ability to drive market share to their preferreds," said de Gaspe Beaubien. "That's increasingly important as meetings commissions continue to see cuts and corporates need to drive more volume for stronger negotiations."