Mondelez International's Sabrina Hinke

Mondelez International travel manager for the Americas Sabrina Hinke had been revving up her meetings management and sourcing strategy for at least a year and was ready to launch in March 2020. The first official case of Covid-19 was in Brazil was confirmed on Feb. 26 in a man returning from a business trip to Italy. We all know what happened next: The meetings industry hit a hard stop worldwide, along with business travel.

But Mondelez's pilot program for a big data-based meetings sourcing program had already realized significant savings. It leveraged technology start-up company Troop Travel, which ingests meeting parameters like attendee origin data, desired meeting dates, type of hotel, ground transportation options—as well as wear-and-tear issues like airline connections and travel policy details—and returns suggested meeting locations based on a company's priorities. The tool had enabled dozens of Mondelez's decentralized meeting planners to understand instantly how they could maximize the value of their meeting. 

The tool not only ramped up value, it ramped down research time for internal meetings organizers and significantly reduced procurement exercises that were often outsourced to a third-party meetings agency.

"Our meeting organizers had such positive feedback on the tool we provided," said Hinke. "One told us she could complete in just a few minutes on the new platform the same research that would normally take a week. It totally changed the process for us—and also worked as an engagement tool to bring meeting organizers into the program." Furthermore, said Hinke, the tool was customized to Mondelez's needs. 

The latter was a benefit of collaborating with a start-up. Troop Travel (now, simply Troop) needed a strong partner to get its tool working in a real-world corporate environment. Taking a chance on a newcomer, Hinke was also able to engage her internal stakeholders to offer feedback and make changes to the platform—changes that also enhanced the performance of the tool for Troop's future customers.  

Those changes didn't stop in 2020. Troop was early to roll out Covid-19 hotspot data into its platform, preparing clients for a not-to-distant future in which meetings will once again be high points on the calendar. Additionally, said Hinke, Mondelez is trending toward more local meetings, especially as international borders remain largely closed. She has worked with Troop to leverage more local information to facilitate these meeting itineraries, but she knows she'll be ready to scale and move seamlessly to international itineraries as meeting request volumes return in 2021.