Tricia Holly Davis explores the progress of video-conferencing and new technologies for booking events
Earlier this summer Max McCormick, an ear, nose and throat consultant, drove to the BT Convention Centre at ACC Liverpool for the British Academic Conference in Otolaryngology.
But this was no ordinary medical conference. Dr McCormick was among 250 delegates that travelled to Liverpool to watch two surgeons in the Beziers Causse Clinic in the South of France perform simultaneous live ear surgery via a video-conferencing link. The Live International Otology Network (LION) technology allowed conference delegates in Liverpool to interact with the surgeons and ask questions throughout the procedure.
For Dr McCormick, the technology represents a medical breakthrough. "This means surgeons from all over the world can watch and learn from one another without having to take time out of their busy schedules to travel abroad," he said.
For the business travel community, the LION technology represents a significant evolution in how meetings are organised and conducted. Like with all technology, video-conferencing has come a long way in recent years. Fuzzy-screened gizmos that annoyingly bleeped and blipped their way through a meeting have been replaced with slick, human-like technologies such as HP's Halo and Cisco's TelePresence.
Although such technologies can come with a hefty, six-figure price tag, the recession has actually made these tools more attractive. A recent study by global technology consultancy Lewis PR found that UK staff spend the equivalent of eight weeks a year in face-to-face meetings, but more than half of businesses are now instructing employees to drastically reduce the number of meetings they attend. Reasons for these measures are largely down to cost-cutting, travel restrictions, staff shortages and the need to maximise productivity by increasing time spent in the office.
The survey of 500 UK companies found 40 per cent are cutting down on face-to-face meetings because of the credit crunch. This rises to 53 per cent in London and is highest among middle and senior management.
Overall, some one in three respondents suggested an increased use of one internet-related media, including video-conferencing, as a means to reduce time spent in external meetings and cut costs. Almost a quarter of respondents in London prefer video-conferencing.
The findings are echoed by business travel groups such as the Association of Corporate Travel Executives (ACTE ) and Institute of Travel & Meetings (ITM). ACTE reports about 70 per cent of business travel managers will cut budgets this year, versus the one-third predicted a year ago. Likewise, ITM reports 81 per cent of buyers managing meetings and events believed expenditure would continue to decrease for the next 12 months, while 36 per cent expect budgets to continue to decline over the next decade.
Companies like HP are taking full advantage of the trend by adding more bells and whistles that improve video quality and speed. HP, for instance, recently combined its Halo business with its networking technology to provides users with a 'one-stop shopping' portal that lets companies tailor-make the video technology, IT services and network solutions to fit their needs. "Together, these offerings are aimed at helping customers reduce operating costs, travel less, lower demands on IT staff and expand their web casting reach," says Ken Crangle, vice president and general manager of HP's Halo.
"Travel budget cutbacks mean there is a big emphasis on cost avoidance, so corporate customers want to know if they can use video-conferencing before they even consider planning a meeting," says Trevor Elswood, group managing director of BSI, a meetings and event management solutions company and owner of London-based event management company Olive 360°.
Of course, a growing appetite to replace face-to-face meetings with smarter video technologies in the name of cost reduction doesn't mean people will stop attending meetings and events. Rather, Elswood says, "people want to get a total cost of spend in the meetings space".
For example, he says procurement departments are more often taking an active role in the meetings space, because they see the value of visual guilt and improved compliance to their preferred venues and policy in the same way they have with other sectors like car hire, airlines and hotels.
BSI, which booked 1.7 million room nights and 17,000 meetings and events last year, recently developed an online meetings tool that allows conference planners to explore video-conferencing and internal meetings options, as well as price, and book external venues.
Elswood estimates about 20 per cent of all small meetings - those with less than 20 delegates - made through BSI are now booked online with no human intervention. This is significant given that the vast majority - around 80 per cent - of meetings and events are in the modest 10 to 20 delegate range.
Like traditional travel self- booking tools (SBTs), Elswood says the benefit of using an online meeting tool is that it allows corporations to avoid a transaction fee. BSI also gives high adoption clients a kickback from the commission it receives from venues.
For BSI the advantage is the ability to handle more clients and devote more time to complex meetings.
"In the old days, an agent would spend as much time planning a 10-person meeting as a 50-person meeting, because the process of going back and forth between the venue and client is the same," says Elswood. "Now, we can cut the through low value transactions and focus on intricate events. This also allows us to be more price-competitive, because we don't have the same overhead costs."
Hotel Reservation Service (HRS), one of Europe's largest online hotel booking portals, also has a real-time online tool for meetings and events with up to 20 delegates. The tool enables users to select the time, place, date, hotel location and category of hotel, compare meeting facilities and prices, and book venues directly. Bookers can also specify the number of people, equipment and seating arrangements required. The Direct Conference Booking solution returns a flat per person rate for a standard package that includes room hire, refreshments and a meal, as well as rates for accommodation.
Another online meetings tool to hit the market recently comes from CiEvents, the event management company owned by Flight Centre. Its EVENTS Interactive (Ei) tool is designed to simplify the group conference registration and management process by allowing attendees, speakers and committees to interact with one another online, without the end user requiring any training.
The platform operates in a real-time environment, so inventory is continuously updated. The tool also has a connection to business traveller profiles and allows attendees to edit their data online.
Individual hotel groups are also making headway in the online meetings space. Marriott introduced a tool that enables meeting planners to check availability across all of its brands and properties around the world for room blocks between 10 and 25 for up to seven nights. Organisers have instant access to space dimensions and floor plans of the hotels' meeting space and can also secure banquet rooms.
"The meetings space is a bit like the final frontier in the online world," says BSI's Elswood. The main reason the meetings and events sector has been slower to shift online than other areas, such as air travel, is down to the inability of various technologies to communicate with each other. "It seems crazy in today's day and age that we're still not to the point where various systems that include venue information, traveller profiles, corporate policies and so on can't talk to each other, but this is really only just starting to happen," Elswood says.
He predicts the next generation of meetings solutions will enable conference planners to see the total cost of a meeting, including the costs linked to travelling to a destination, as well as the environmental impact of holding a meeting in a particular venue.
"There are a lot of tools today that allow companies to price the cost of a trip and a meeting and do carbon reporting, but there's not a single tool that integrates all of these functions," Elswood says. "It's a bit of a shame but everyone is building for their own competitive advantage. The panacea in the meetings space is to remove all the technical barriers and find out how competitors can work together, rather than against one another, in order to offer the best solution for their clients."