Meeting targets

Two sourcing categories have dominated client assignments for Areka Consulting during 2025, according to Martina Eggler, the travel management consultancy’s senior vice president for the DACH (Germany, Austria, Switzerland) region. It will come as no surprise that one is reviewing clients’ travel management company relationships following significant ownership upheavals in the sector.

The other may raise more eyebrows: helping companies to introduce a strategy for managing their meetings spend. “This topic has gained high management attention, perhaps even surpassing business travel,” says Eggler. “It very often starts with communication at global level from top management.”

Larissa Steinbäcker, co-CEO of strategic meetings agency Proske, is also witnessing businesses embracing meetings management for the first time, and a “second spring” where companies with partly established programmes are pushing on again. “I'm seeing companies taking a lot of tasks back in-house and growing their internal events departments, or they're going full-out and trying a global approach with just one or two agencies,” she says. “They are definitely moving in one or the other direction.”

Like Eggler, Steinbäcker notes the impetus coming from the top. “Senior management wants total visibility of spend,” she says. Although there are other drivers, such as risk management, both agree cost is the number one factor driving new or renewed focus on meetings – a view supported by recently published 2026 meetings forecasts from both American Express Global Business Travel and BCD Travel.

In an uncertain political and economic environment generating numerous external threats to profitability, businesses are looking to balance those risks by taking a tighter grip on internal costs. One area where they see costs rising quickly is meetings. A multiplier effect is at play: many companies are meeting more often than they used to, and cost per meeting is rising fast.

Internal team get-togethers especially are on the up, says Areka MICE (meetings, incentives, conferences and events) lead Claudia Kusche, because colleagues are increasingly less likely to work in the same country, let alone the same building. Rising demand naturally exerts upward pressure on price. “Before it was easy to get a venue outside the high season,” says Kusche. Now the notion of a cheaper low season is disappearing because venues are busy all year round.

There are other reasons for demand and supply becoming imbalanced. One, says Kusche, is that some venues never reopened after the Covid lockdowns.

Another, according to Steinbäcker, is that there are new “constraints on where you can have meetings.” She has noted particularly organisers of international meetings avoiding the USA because of the Trump administration’s hostile immigration policies. “We have had cases where the meeting would have taken place in the United States but the client pulled back because they were scared that not everyone would be able to to attend,” Steinbäcker says.

The closing off of the USA is causing especially acute supply shortages for large congresses, she adds, because other countries have far fewer venues big enough. As availability dwindles, prices inflate, and meetings rates are spiralling in any case owing to venues facing higher costs for labour, food and beverage, and utilities.

Whatever the reasons, recognising meetings need to be managed to reduce cost is one thing; figuring out how to manage is often a daunting prospect. As always, management control begins by gathering data, but that is notoriously difficult when it comes to meetings, involving ferreting through numerous sources including card and expense data, general ledgers and supplier reports.

Complicating matters further, says Eggler, “the question of who is involved in organising meetings and events can be even more surprising because very often we are talking about a large number of people. Companies are often quite shocked to find out who is involved.” The consequence of lack of visibility can be chaotic, including, says Kusche, “in many companies different organisers paying different rates in the same hotel.”

Sometimes, strategic meetings managers have to admit partial defeat with their initial information-gathering efforts and instead put processes in place, such as installing a meetings booking and management technology platform, that will make it easier to collect data in future years.

Whether armed with good data or not, proceeding to attack meetings costs involves a blend of demand and supply management. The latter begins with policy, according to the meetings manager for a financial services company who spoke to BTN Europe on condition of anonymity.

“Policies will say if you can meet virtually, then do so,” the meetings manager says. “The next part of the policy will be to require utilisation of internal space before booking other people’s space. Then you tell bookers they need to provide a solid case for having the meeting. And are there aspects of the conference we can do virtually so we only bring people together for 48 hours instead of 72?”

Location choice is another key consideration. “How do we get them there cost-effectively and efficiently, because time is money,” the manager says. Yet, paradoxically, given that the travelling may be more complicated, “rather than primary cities, do we look at secondary and tertiary cities that are at a lower price point?”

Plenty can also be achieved through careful supplier negotiation, starting with “leveraging your corporate events and transient travel spend where there’s a crossover – anything going into hotels, for example,” the same meetings manager says.

Companies normally work with specialist meetings planning agencies, and that is a relationship where careful procurement is also needed. “Agencies often use their preferred suppliers, not the client’s,” says Kusche. “We also compare the fees. If you do not give them a pricing template, you will be surprised by the unexpected extra fees you will receive.” Similarly, she adds, “we give venues pricing tables and let them respond to our pricing and not the other way around.”

An emerging source of potential savings is technology. Companies coming to meetings management later than for transient travel, says Kusche, reap the benefit of being able to procure platforms that make their meetings processes digital from the outset.

There is also early, heavy adoption of artificial intelligence. “We're using AI for pretty much every project component from an operational perspective,” says Steinbäcker. “Examples include writing attendee communications such as reminders, frequently asked questions, registration, surveys and translation of all of the above into different languages.”

Artists and musicians may be alarmed to learn that Proske’s creative department is using AI “from A to Z. I mean logo creation, branding, adoption and motion design and rendering,” Steinbäcker says. “We've done whole AI songs for our clients which would previously have involved costs for a band and production.”

There is less consensus, at least at this stage, over how valuable AI is for meetings sourcing. “We're using it for assistance. For example, to summarise proposals,” Steinbäcker says.

Kusche agrees. “Now with AI you can analyse data packages in minutes. Beforehand, you got purchasing data plus spend data from cards and you had to go a long way through the pivot to get the analysis you needed. But now you put these pivots into Copilot or whatever system you use and you get it in seconds.”

But, says the meetings manager, “everyone keeps banging on about AI being the new Messiah. I’m not so sure. From the planner’s perspective it can speed up administrative tasks. I would use it to crunch some numbers but right now we don’t have those numbers. In time we will use AI to dice and slice and interpret data, but I’m not sure at this stage that I trust it.”