Meetings programmes are increasingly on travel conference agendas and some buyers are starting to dip their toes into what appears to now be more manageable, or another new area to save money.
One buyer for a large multinational is putting similar traits of its transient travel programme into meetings and events. It has only been collecting data on this spend for 18 months in the US and now has better visibility on spend and behaviour such as the fact most meetings are internal. It now captures data for meetings and events in more than 30 countries.
Another buyer is starting off by mandating that meetings and events bookings are made through a TMC, with the aim to not only see spend and patterns but with a strong duty of care and tracking perspective behind it.
Anne Marie Crawford, head of sales at Inntel agrees that buyers need to understand where travellers are and also the ancillary spend which can be leveraged in future negotiations. Festive Road's Ian Jones advises also looking at other pots of spend such as marketing or training to match what is happening across the business; the expense and finance teams will be good places to look too.
It is from here that buyers will start to make decisions on the suppliers to use (whether technology, TMC, venue, hotel etc) and potential strategies. There are a growing number of online booking tools specialising in the meetings sector and Jones believes one-day meetings can easily be transactional like online travel agent bookings for hotels. Possibly 2-3 day events can be handled that way too, leaving the RFPs for the larger, more complicated stuff.