Bill Lemmon is Altour's vice president of global MICE sales
Altour is looking to meetings and events to drive growth amid softer transient travel volumes, bringing its meetings and events business under a single brand and investing in new scalable management tools.
For Bill Lemmon, the company’s vice president of global sales for MICE, the opportunity lies in data capture, and helping clients gain a clearer picture of their total programme spend through technology that can scale across markets. That includes the recently introduced Altour IQ travel intelligence platform.
Lemmon spoke with BTN’s Lauren Arena last month about retiring the YES brand from Altour’s M&E portfolio, the TMC’s evolving tech strategy and why face-to-face relationships remain central to the agency’s value. The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Business Travel News: What was the thinking behind bringing UK-based meetings and events specialist Your Event Solutions under the Altour brand?
Bill Lemmon: [YES] had such a strong presence in the London market, and that name is recognisable. A couple of years ago, they thought it was recognisable enough to put it on our other brands where we do meetings and events, the US service centre and everything out of Mexico City. What we came to find out is that globally it didn’t have as much presence as it did within that local London market.
Because of that, there was some confusion when we had our [transient] travel clients come over to the meetings and events side. There was confusion about the brand: “Is this really part of your company?” Those kinds of questions.
It just made a lot more sense from a branding perspective, internally and externally. Our marketing dollars could now go towards one brand instead of marketing two different companies individually.
BTN: Why is the M&E vertical becoming a more important growth opportunity?
Lemmon: We see travel volume slowing down a little bit. Ticket prices going up, so that kind of keeps us even, but the only way we can grow is the meetings and events space, because that’s based on need. Companies need to meet, especially in this world where the majority of our work is via Zoom or Teams meetings. It’s more and more important for us to meet in person.
What corporations are looking at is, “How do I get my people together to meet and grow my business?” This could be consumer-based, or it could be internal meetings.
For the longest time, [Altour’s M&E business] was treated as a separate company with a separate P&L. Meetings and events is now a very important part of that top-line revenue, and Gabe Rizzi [Altour President & CEO] sees where that M&E growth can expand much quicker than on the TMC side. That’s why we invested a lot to change the name. It takes a lot of labour and internal resources to make that happen.
BTN: Where are you seeing opportunities for growth?
Lemmon: Where we’re seeing a lot of our bigger global opportunities is coming out of EMEA, where there are fewer players in the market on a global scale. The big RFPs coming in have typically been coming out of there, and we’re seeing a handful coming out of India to.
We already see a very robust calendar for 2027, 2028 and 2029. We know we’re going to need to add headcount for future opportunities, but we’re going to do it as demand needs it, not just to make headcount look better.
BTN: Where do you see the biggest opportunity in bringing corporate travel and meetings together?
Lemmon: You already see travel managers now having the responsibility [for meetings and events] under the procurement section of an organisation. Where we’re seeing a lot of success is showing how a managed programme can capture all your meetings, events and travel spend by giving [procurement leaders] a tool to see how much they're actually spending per year and how many events they actually do per year… a lot of global companies, like a Fortune 500 or a Fortune 100 company, just don't have an idea of what their total spend is.
Once you provide that data, you can give them an actionable item to go forward with… And if it weren’t for recent evolutions in technology, say over the last four to five years, it would still be unbelievably hard to capture that spend on a global basis and report that data.
BTN: And how does Altour’s technology stack support that?
Lemmon: What we try to do is create a process that not only works in the US, the UK, Mexico or anywhere in the world, but is consistent and scalable. It comes through an MRF—a meeting request form. Everybody fills that out. Whether the client fills it out or a member of our internal team, the request will go through a system and through what we call Altour IQ, our project management platform that captures all that data, and then we put it into a BI tool at the end.
So, [users] can look at their monthly spend by just going to the BI tool. They don’t have to ask a lot of people a lot of questions. They have a format where they can go in on a regular basis and just pull that data.
Whether it’s 10,000 meetings a year, 2,000 meetings a year, 100 meetings a year or two meetings a year, we need the exact same process for everybody. No matter what size the business is, we can scale to that business. We can scale small or we can scale big.
[Altour currently is conducting a "phased commercial rollout" of Altour IQ, which will be widely available by the first quarter of 2027, according to the company.]
BTN: How would you describe your technology strategy moving forward?
Lemmon: Technology changes so quickly. If you have a legacy tool or a proprietary tool, it can become outdated very quickly, and then you’re going to have to switch. At my previous employer, we had our own proprietary platforms for a while, and we just couldn’t keep up with everything.
To me, you have to be nimble. You have to be technology-agnostic. If you find better technology, you use that technology. There’s so much innovation in that marketplace. You have to vet that technology and make sure it’s right for you, and make sure the integration works, and that it’s secure.
One of the key questions I see in all the RFPs from big Fortune 100 companies is, “What does the security look like?” And it’s not just the procurement team asking that question. It’s security people. It’s their IT folks… We talk about data security all the time and how important it is.
BTN: Several TMC players are targeting M&E with integrated travel and meetings platforms, while BCD and FCM are also investing in creative production capabilities. Is Altour exploring creative production too?
Lemmon: One thing we’ve stayed away from is that production side, because it’s not our core business right now. In order for us to do that, we would have to go out and acquire. For our clients who need that, we have partners that we utilise. To me, that’s their specialty.
I worked for MCI for 13 years [prior to joining Altour earlier this year], and before that I was a trade show general contractor. The profit margin on that business is relatively low because you have to throw labour at it. You have to throw creative labour at it, and you have to throw expensive labour at it. Usually you need very dedicated, very experienced people to be able to do that.
In our current model, it’s better for us to partner because then I only pay for those people when I need them. I would rather get what we do right and make it scalable than go after another revenue source.
BTN: Amid increased automation, where does the value of a meetings agency ultimately lie?
Lemmon: The value is you and I. Technology is just what makes it flow on the back end. The key to all of this is the relationship between me and you. All the technology is background noise. If I can’t deliver the face-to-face, then what are we doing?
We will usually have a senior leadership meeting with clients to outline the core principles that determine their return on investment: Is it a feel-good? Is it a survey afterwards that says we did great? Or was it run efficiently? All of that is important, but at the end of the day, it’s still me looking in your face, you looking in my face, and we have an interaction.
That’s something we’re never going to replace with AI. All the technology in the world makes it efficient to get to that point, but when we’re in the room, it’s about us.