Editorial: Vision Of Travel, Mtgs. Convergence Materializing

The vision of travel and meetings convergence articulated by industry leaders and BTN editors for more than 20 years has begun to materialize, and the words spoken and written during the past two decades about that trend being as inexorable as automation, consolidation and globalization ring loud and true today.

While it's a fact that the vast majority of companies still have no idea how much they actually spend on meetings, several large buyers are realizing the potential to use automation to consolidate meetings and travel booking and expense data globally to maximize service and negotiating leverage, and many others are pursuing that course.

In many ways, travel and strategic meetings management are similar. They both require capturing data and restructuring processes and individual traveler behavior to yield savings of 10 percent to 25 percent, depending on a company's travel and meetings activity.

Like travel management, strategic meetings management starts with the capture and analysis of spending data. Neither can be accomplished without senior management endorsement and effective companywide communications. There also is overlap, and room for negotiating, when it comes to working with major services suppliers, such as hotel companies and airlines.

Extensive layoffs and the severity of the continuing need for corporate cost-cutting has led to the undermining of formerly unassailable fiefdom walls within many companies, removing obstacles from the internal aggregation of all meetings spending data, which for so long eluded so many.

While this has helped enable companies to collect meetings data, so has technological advancement. The industry in the past 10 years has seen many significant advances in meetings automation amalgamate under StarCite. While there is still room for innovation by other players, the StarCite tool has achieved significant usage particularly among the largest companies, a few of which are pushing the bounds of what was previously possible. Leading companies are using the tool to capture data on large and small meetings globally and to integrate it with online booking and payment system capabilities to make strategic decisions and as the basis for negotiations.

Persuading senior management to invest in technology during a time of recession and restructuring can be challenging, but the benefits of integrating meetings and travel make too much sense to ignore.

Editor's Note:Business Travel News editors have been experiencing our own travel and meetings convergence as, starting in May, we took on responsibility for our sister publication, MeetingNews.