American Express has signed a deal with technology provider Travent to launch a meetings expense management system for companies in Europe.
Amex said the new product, MeetingView Express would manage the “end-to-end process of meetings and events expense management.”
It will be immediately available to Amex clients in the UK, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Netherlands and Sweden.
Paul Abbott, head of UK and Benelux American Express Commercial Card, said the new product would “generate significant cost savings by better understanding, tracking and managing clients' meeting and events spend.
“This is an area which we believe has been hitherto unexplored from a savings and management potential.”
Ray Thackeray, managing director of Travent, said: “Corporate meeting spend is the last great area of unmanaged spend in most corporations. Fragmented markets as well as the seasonal nature of events, hotel and travel supply, and the lack of transparency between meetings intermediaries such as hotel bookers, meetings agencies and the corporate client, all conspire to make it difficult to understand the spend across markets.”
The new product would give an integrated and comprehensive approach which would save companies money, he said.
‘TMCs have blinkered view on air travel'
Travel management companies (TMCs) focus too much on “low margin air travel” rather than on the “better returns” from providing a good hotel service, Clive Gould, head of the UK consulting firm icor, said.
He said the hotel sector in the UK including meetings spend, was worth £6bn a year but TMC were only just beginning to realise they were missing out on this “lucrative” sector.
Mr Gould, whose company was set up recently by BSI, a hotel bookings agency, called on TMCs to review their hotels solutions and provide their clients with a wide choice of hotels, proper analysis of spending and the introduction of online auctions