The Benefits of Integrating Travel & Meetings Management

Many travel managers now find themselves tasked with managing meetings. On its face, this makes complete sense. After all, they are both travel related, many of the suppliers are the same, they both use similar technologies and require similar processes for looking, booking, traveling, paying and expensing.

Many see combining travel and meetings management as the holy grail of the industry. One of the hard benefits is leveraging combined transient and group spend for strategic hotel sourcing. I recently managed a global hotel RFP for a very large life sciences company and was able to significantly reduce rates for both group and transient and improve concessions and terms and conditions. The savings totaled about 10 percent of the overall cost of the combined programs. Another potential hard benefit is using the same supplier’s transient and group payment platforms to leverage the overall spend volume for rebates.

Soft benefits include increased program transparency and compliance, reduced redundancies and increased efficiencies. When travel and meetings are managed jointly, benefits accrue as the organization cross-utilizes HR and shares technologies, data and procurement processes.

Take Advantage of the Opportunities

When organizations cross-utilize travel and meetings staff, the travel staff comes to understand the issues facing the meetings staff and is able to recommend process improvements based on its travel expertise—and vice versa. Cross-utilization can also help address workload peaks and valleys that both teams experience, reducing temporary staffing adjustments throughout the year.

Cross-platform familiarization is another benefit. For example, a meeting planner can look into the travel expense management system and identify instances when a meeting participant submitted an expense for a meal though the meeting itself provided a meal. If this were a large-enough problem for the company, the organization might choose to make a policy about outside meals during meetings. Similarly, meeting planners could look out for hotel rooms booked outside the meeting room block, or travel managers could identify a traveler who appears to be transient but who booked inside a hotel block and is actually a meeting attendee.

Organizations can realize process efficiencies when travel and meetings staff share their challenges and synergies. For example, cooperation on quarterly hotel chain reviews and RFP processes can lead to more consistent products and services and thus increased traveler/attendee satisfaction.

Additionally, travel and meetings data consolidation not only ensures traveler compliance to preferred suppliers but also provides deeper compliance management. For example, sharing a payment platform helps identify when a meeting attendee books outside the room block and upgrades his or her room.

Duty of care may also improve with joint management. Traveler security improves when event attendee tracking is managed by the same processes used for traveler tracking, allowing meeting participants to be found and aided during emergencies.

Policy collaboration offers another opportunity. While travel and meetings programs should have independent policies because of their relative complexities, development and periodic revisions of those policies should happen jointly and the policies should reference one another.

Beware the Differences

While there are benefits to managing travel and meetings jointly, it is also important to call out the differences in expertise between travel managers and meetings managers. Both are responsible for policy development and management, although a meetings policy focuses much more heavily on regulatory and duty of care compliance.

Travel managers are concerned with online booking and expense management systems, while meetings managers need to know sourcing, budgeting, attendee management and reporting solutions, in addition to any of 20-plus other categories of meeting technologies.

Compliance management in travel programs typically focuses on supplier compliance, but meeting programs focus on regulatory and duty of care compliance because the stakes for regulatory breaches are financial penalties and government oversight and because the theft of an organization’s intellectual property at live events is very high.

Key stakeholders also differ in meetings programs, and the stakes are much higher than in travel. A meetings buyer is purchasing for tens, hundreds or thousands of event participants. If something goes wrong in a travel program, it usually impacts one traveler’s experience. But if something goes wrong in a meetings program, tens or hundreds of attendees can be negatively impacted, often customers whose buying decisions are influenced by the quality of their experience.

Finally, resistance to change can be significant in meetings programs, as entrenched interests like internal corporate meeting planners and incumbent meeting planning companies resist any change that threatens their livelihoods.

For organizations to be successful in managing meetings they need to assign those with true meetings management expertise, to help their travel managers build that expertise or to engage supplemental external resources with the deep domain expertise in meetings management to realize the full benefits.