|
Posted Aug 5, 2010
I found a couple of really interesting findings from a broad, new study by Egencia and the NBTA Foundation on the importance of travel policy to good business travel management -- and a few of the results touch on groups and meetings, specifically. I thought I'd share because I'm always trying to spread the word about how setting and enforcing strong policies will transform your meetings management program.
Posted Jul 5, 2010
Posted Jun 22, 2010
Putting the term "commodity" in the same sentence as travel and meetings is like adding Lady Gaga as an inductee to the Rock 'n Roll Hall of Fame; you either agree or disagree with the parallelism but there is no denying that it is the big elephant in the room. Do you believe that business travel, meetings and events are commodities? The term caused us to stir in our seats while participating in an NBTA/StarCite-sponsored meeting yesterday.
Posted Jun 16, 2010
Different companies have different priorities when it comes to being good corporate citizens. Your firm may be focused on feeding the hungry, while another may be into cleaning up the environment (or at least committed to preventing it from becoming more polluted). Or maybe you're lucky enough to work for a company with a wide target list of how to help out humanity.
Posted Jun 9, 2010
Speaking during this week’s New York University International Hospitality Industry Investment conference, Best Western International CEO David Kong said since June 4 hotels located around the Gulf Coast experienced a "tremendous amount of cancellations" and "the number of inquiries coming in have dropped significantly" due to the British Petroleum oil leak raging through the Gulf of Mexico.
Posted May 13, 2010
Consistent with other indicators and reports, the numbers that have come out of the new American Express/CFO Research Global Business & Spending Monitor indicate that business (granted it’s the “new normal”) is rebounding. The survey of 479 senior finance executives from the U.S., Europe, Canada, Mexico, Asia, and Australia, shows that they're upbeat about economic growth. And better yet, many are planning to increase spending in areas that will support revenue growth -- like meetings.
Posted May 12, 2010
The recent announcement of the merger between United Airlines and Continental Airlines, right on the heels of the marriage of Delta Air Lines and Northwest Airlines, sent a lot of folks scrambling to make sense of a new landscape of suppliers in the airline industry. One thing is for certain, competition will be reduced, which will eventually lead to higher consumer prices. But more importantly, the chasm between the behemoths and the rest of the industry just got significantly wider and what that means to corporate travel and meeting programs is anyone’s guess. Will that mean some shotgun weddings for stand-alones like American Airlines, US Air, Alaska, Southwest, etc.? Time will tell…
Posted Apr 2, 2010
Earlier this year, I wrote about how the so-called "Sunshine Act" legislation that was pending in Congress would set new standards on reporting of gifts, payments and travel to doctors by pharmaceutical companies and medical device manufacturers. I urged that pharmaceutical companies get their meetings management programs in order to prepare for the stringent reporting that would be required if the bill passed.
Posted Mar 29, 2010
Are green meetings still a priority for your company? For many meeting managers, the recession may have put the goal of reducing carbon emissions on hold for a while, but I know many others that continue to aim for both optimum cost-control and green meetings. The challenge has not been abandoned.
Posted Mar 26, 2010
There is startling news from American Express' "Managing Travel in the New Normal" survey that was released this week. I say startling because, on one level, it shows increasing sophistication around meetings management, yet I'm dismayed by other findings about the lack of movement on some very basic principles.
First I'll focus on the sophisticated.
|
