Meetings management is regularly described as the "last frontier" of managed business travel. It is the area where great savings are there to be made – if only the spend could be integrated with that of transient travel.
But while this carrot is dangling in front of travel managers, there seems a reluctance to grasp it.
Both Carlson Wagonlit Travel (CWT) and Hotelscene, a UK online booking agency, say that a company's meetings and events spend can amount to up to 40% of its total T&E budget. This is a sizeable proportion of the budget and surely worth grappling with. But such figures are often accompanied by the grimmer observation that many, perhaps a majority of, companies do not actually know how much they spend on meetings and events.
This does not seem to be for want of advice or help.
CWT, in its new edition, published this week, of Effective Travel Management, lists eight key levers to optimise a travel programme.
Integrating meetings and events into the travel programme comes in at number seven – not high but enough of a priority to make the list.
In the recent BCD Travel Insight on Corporate Travel 2008, European buyers listed meetings management as their fifth biggest challenge (after other challenges like supplier negotiations and travel policy compliance).
Most major travel management companies have meetings and events departments ready with advice and help for companies wishing to set up a meetings management programme (MMP) -sometimes also called a strategic meetings management programme.
Nor is there a shortage of information. In America, which is comfortably ahead of Europe in meetings management, its travel managers' association, the National Business Travel Association (NBTA) has over the past few years put out a series of comprehensive papers on how to set up and run an MMP.
Few major conferences, like those run by ACTE, NBTA or the UK's ITM, are now complete without session on meetings management.
Hotelscene just recently ran a web-cast in which its business development manager Jean Squires laid out the detailed case for companies adopting a MMP.
More and more companies are setting a MMP in motion. But in general the response is disappointing.
Returning to the BCD Insight, it found that three out of five buyers said they had full responsibility for meetings management or had an advisory or influential role on them. Only 10% felt they had no influence.
When asked how they rated their level of meetings management, only 1% said it was "excellent" and 11% "very good". 23% said it was "satisfactory", 26% said it "needs improvement" and 7% described it as "poor". A further 33% gave no indication.
From what BTE can gather from off the record conversations, one of the reasons these type of figures emerge is the sheer complexity of taking on a company's meetings and events and shaping them into some kind of coherent policy.
It can be time consuming, expensive (as expertise is needed), take perhaps years to draw up and implement and, perhaps most off putting of all, it is a highly emotive area fraught with mine fields and potential obstructions.
Bruce Morgan, senior vp for marketing and business development for BCD Meetings and Incentives, comes close to acknowledging some of this. A key issue, he said, is the contradictory challenge of responsibility and budget.
"Although a buyer might have been given a responsibility for meetings, he might not have the authority to truly control the meetings programme, especially since the meetings budget frequently sits elsewhere in the organisation, making meetings management a political issue," he said.
It is easy to dream up scenarios where exactly this might happen. The ceo asks the PA to arrange a two day event with some top customers where a few short meetings, some golf, some relaxation and a good dinner are on the programme.
The PA, knowing it is an event which must impress the guest, picks a smart and expensive country house hotel and orders limousines for transport, neither of which is on the company's list of preferred suppliers. So who pays? And how does the buyer, working to a MMP, prise the "ownership" of this event out of the PA's hands without a row? And where does the ceo stand on cutting costs and keeping to policy?
Not surprisingly buyers would approach such a situation with caution. Yet there are potential savings of up to 10%-20% to be made.
Even getting support from senior management - essential in any programme of change - may not
guarantee success. It seems to be an area of far greater challenge than implementing a travel policy.