Corporate Traveller, Flight Centre Travel Group’s travel management company focused on the SME market, has launched a dedicated meetings and events offering for UK clients.
The offering comprises two core services: ‘Managed Meetings’ for gatherings of 10 to 200 attendees, covering venue sourcing, rooming lists, audio-visual coordination and food and beverage planning; and ‘Event Management’, an end-to-end service for events with at least 75 delegates, spanning pre-event planning and group travel arrangements, onsite delivery and post-event reporting.
“Events have become the single biggest reason our customers travel, but the businesses driving that growth aren’t always resourced to manage it,” said Bonnie Smith, head of Corporate Traveller UK. “Rather than asking customers to bring in a separate agency, we’ve built this offering around the same relationship they already trust us for on travel.”
Smith said SMEs are increasingly looking to incorporate strategic meetings management into their businesses. She added that 40 per cent of the company’s UK clients expect to increase their M&E spend in 2027, while a further 38 per cent already allocate more than half of their total travel budget to meetings and events.
“Strategic meetings are becoming a core part of how [SMEs] plan their business,” she said, with reporting, duty of care and traveller wellbeing among the key considerations.
“It depends where the SME is in their journey – and if they're only growing because of travel, they recognise the need to bring [a strategic meetings management programme] into their business to make sure they continue to see that growth,” Smith said.
Of Corporate Traveller’s more than 2,400 ‘active’ UK clients, Smith said around 30 per cent fall within the mid-to-high spending range and are investing in meetings management. “For our first year [of Corporate Traveller M&E] that’s who we’re targeting.”
The team behind the new M&E division will be drawn from within Flight Centre Travel Group, where fellow corporate travel brand FCM already has an established meetings and events team.
Corporate Traveller’s agents will refer enquiries to the M&E team, enabling SME clients to retain the “one-on-one” relationship with their existing travel manager.
Smith said M&E services will be priced as a percentage of overall meetings spend. The fee will be negotiated at the time of booking and is likely to range from 10 to 14 per cent, “but there’s always room for negotiation,” Smith said, “because we don't just want one event. We want to take your whole programme.”
Corporate Traveller Meetings & Events is now available to UK clients. The company also plans to launch the service in Canada and South Africa, followed by the US, Australia and New Zealand.
The launch comes as a growing number of travel management companies and service providers sharpen their focus on meetings and events.
Last month, Spotnana acquired meetings search and logistics platform Troop, while in June Navan launched a unified platform for travel and meetings management. In May, BCD Meetings & Events introduced 'Strategic Production Management', a service it said combines strategic oversight, creative thinking and scalable production delivery by applying an SMM framework to event design and production. The service has been piloted with several North American clients, with plans to expand into additional markets to support global programmes.