Industry Segments

Strategic meetings management is an evolving, growing marketplace that extends into numerous related segments of the travel, hospitality and business intelligence software industries. In order to get a good look at where the industry is today and where it is going in the future, it is important to take a look at the three primary components of the overall meetings management process.

• Event Registration Management

The meetings management process begins with the fundamental decision to hold the meeting or event and the steps involved in managing invitations, registration and related attendee arrangements.  The first place that the web was used to facilitate this process was the development of web-based registration tools that enabled attendees to learn about the purpose of the meeting or event, investigate the opportunities presented by participating, and quickly and easily register to attend. 

Online registration websites provide meetings planners with tremendous value in managing the event promotion and attendee registration processes. These sites offer attendees a single source of all the relevant information necessary to participate, including dates, locations, hotel and travel accommodations, costs, etc., as well as a simple way to enter the information required to attend. Online registration sites also provide a structured format for meeting planners to gather all of the information they need to manage the meeting – number and types of attendees, breakout meeting rooms, hotel blocks required, meals and entertainment details, etc.

Finally, online event registration and management tools also provide a powerful way to collect detailed financial information regarding the numerous expenses incurred in holding a specific event – cost-per attendee, location-based pricing comparisons, time-of-year differences by geographic destination, vendor-to-vendor comparisons, etc. When properly collected and analyzed, this data becomes a valuable asset in controlling costs, determining return on investment and cost-effectively planning future meetings and events.

• Integrated Travel Management

Another key factor in managing meetings and events is the role that travel plays in the success and cost-effective management of these events. Over the years, business travel managers have adopted a myriad of tools and methodologies related to controlling the cost of corporate travel, from negotiating agreements with airlines and hotels to instituting company-wide travel policies and designated vendors for employee travel and hospitality expenses. Corporate credit cards and other payment systems have also been instituted that enable corporations to capture valuable travel information, control out of pocket expenses and ensure compliance with corporate spending policies.

Strategic meetings management has evolved right along with these advancements, enabling meetings planners and travel planners alike to leverage the visibility and data collected through Global Distribution System (GDS) and Personal Name Record (PNR) booking tools. Today's strategic meetings management systems enable planners to integrate event registration and travel management into a single system, allowing both meeting and travel planners to better manage corporate policy compliance, logistics, communications and enterprise-wide reporting requirements.

The most advanced systems available today provide tremendous new features and benefits, including enabling meetings planners to automatically create and distribute arrival and departure manifests for attendees by drawing real-time data directly from unlimited PNR-based travel bookings. Matching this information with individual registration data drawn from online registration systems also generates a wealth of valuable reports and tools that facilitate event operations. Ground transportation to and from multiple airports, late arrivals, hotel check-ins and a host of other time-consuming arrangements can be coordinated in real time in a single, easily accessible dashboard.

• Spend Analysis and Cost Management

The ultimate goal of strategic meetings management is to provide an increased level of visibility and control to the corporate meetings management process. Despite the tremendous progress made in reining in overhead costs, streamlining processes and monitoring spending on a department-by-department basis in virtually every other area of corporate operations, relatively little progress has been made in controlling the growth of overall meetings-related costs.

The reason for this stems from the fact that responsibility for setting up and managing the wide range of meetings held by a given corporation is widely dispersed across numerous business divisions and multiple levels of authority. These responsibilities are so varied and so far flung, that many organizations have no way to even identify how many meetings are being held in a given year, let alone what the cumulative costs are for conducting them. Strategic meetings management is intended to provide this level of visibility, oversight and control across the entire corporate enterprise.

Spend management is the latest arrow in the quiver of strategic meetings management solutions providers, and only lately have initial products begun to emerge in the marketplace that attempt to provide comprehensive analysis and management of overall meetings spend. One key to a successful spend management system is a fully-customizable rules generator that takes into account literally every aspect involved in the meeting planning processes – from initial budgeting, site selection and vendor authorization to attendee notifications, business unit allocations and step-by-step cost monitoring. Another key is the ability to manage all of the data collected from a single dashboard that monitors each stage of the meeting request, approval and management process. Finally, these tools need to enable users to drill down into every detail of information needed to ensure compliance with policies, maximize cost-efficiencies and ensure effective meeting management.