For many companies, meetings spend is frustratingly opaque. It can represent up to 35% of a company’s total travel budget. (In industries like pharmaceuticals and financial services, it’s an even larger percentage.) But it’s often fragmented and hidden.
The task of uncovering and integrating a company’s transient travel and meetings can seem daunting. Yet it makes a lot of sense, and the good news is that integration isn’t an all-or-nothing proposition. A paper from BCD Travel, Come Together: Integrating Your Corporate Travel and Meetings Programs, is a primer on the small and large steps you can take toward integration—and why you should get started now.
The paper explains the benefits your company can gain from integrating travel and meetings, such as:
- Better supplier relations
- Consistent supplier terms and conditions
- Better risk management
- Better employee service and satisfaction
- Better travel management
- Better use of resources
Come Together also details four key steps you can take toward travel and meetings integration. Here’s an overview:
Step 1: Assess
- Understand what you want and whether integration will get you there
- Determine which tasks you should outsource
- Win senior management buy-in
Step 2: Integrate internally
- Create a merged team
- Integrate your travel and meeting policies
- Integrate your technology—for example, create a single portal, maximize your online booking tool, combine reporting tools
Step 3: Integrate supplier management
- Create consistent terms and conditions
- Be patient—make sure you have aggregated travel and meetings data before starting to negotiate
- Show suppliers what they can gain by giving you a combined deal
- Reduce your hotel numbers prudently to deliver more business to preferred suppliers
- Show suppliers what they can lose; explain they’ll no longer win any out-of-policy meeting bookings
Step 4: Communicate
- Manage the change
- Explain the “why,” as well as the “what” to meeting planners, focusing on the importance of improved sourcing
- Communicate the successes of the program to your senior sponsors and internal customers
- Show the success of the program and the added benefits everyone is receiving
Learn more about integrated travel and meetings by talking to your account manager and downloading the full paper, Come Together: Integrating Your Corporate Travel and Meetings Programs. You’ll find it at bcdtravel.com.