Consultants PWC saved nearly £9m when it adopted a managed meetings programme, its business services manager Samantha van Leeuwen told a seminar at the Business Travel Show in London.
When the company looked at its meetings spend in 2001, it found it spent £52m a year on meetings and £28m on transient business like room nights.
Ms van Leeuwen said PWC was working with 13,000 hotels in the UK as well as and various different venue finders and management agencies.
"We decided to bring the spend together. We found that 90% of our meetings were the same and only 10% different. So we decided we could negotiate on the 90%," she said.
The result was the use of fewer venues finders and agencies, negotiated rates with hotel groups and savings in the first year of implantation of £8.77m.
Ms van Leeuwen said the first step was the creation of a procurement strategy and then sending RFPs to hotel groups and agencies. PWC also created a database of all information on rates, hotels and agencies used.
She said in the negotiations, PWC had improved the cancellation clauses, secured inclusive packages and had a "no commitment to volume" clause in each. It meant that hotel group offered similar packages to PWC.
Bookers were given a simplified system to reserve meeting space from a list of preferred suppliers.
Ms van Leeuwen said that Management Information on bookings and spend had proved critical.
"You need to know the cost of an event before not afterwards," she said.
Earlier Ray Thackeray, managing director of Travent OnVantage EMEA, said that meetings were big business.
According to the Meeting Professionals International's Future Watch, there would be an increase of 21% in meetings this year compared with 2005, with 42% of companies saying their budget would rise.
But while 71% of companies used an internal planner only 39% integrated their Meetings and Event spend (M&E) with the Travel and entertainment spend (T&E).
"M&E is as much as 30 years behind T&E where you are seeing the globalisation of spend. In M&E Management Information is fragmented and if you can't manage spend, you can't track it and you can't negotiate if you don't know what you spend," he said.