We published a story this week in
The Transnational about
Mark Avery from PricewaterhouseCoopers and his virtual meetings program. One thing we didn't include was Mark's challenge to travel management companies.
Jeff Goldblum isn’t the best looking dude, but when he’s
The Fly that’s downright creepy. So I was pretty freaked out when the Chicago Business Travel Association (
CBTA) asked me to moderate a panel that, among other topics, was covering "teleportation." It was always cool when they did that beaming thing on Star Trek, but hey, things can go wrong when you don’t have The Priceline Negotiator.
Has your organization staged a virtual meeting in the past year? What's more, has your company bought or leased collaboration/virtual meetings tech. More importantly, are you managing the strategy, policy creation and compliance tracking for all virtual meetings technologies as part of your travel and meetings portfolio?
To save a buck in this new economy, a lot of companies are stepping up use of web- and video-conferencing for certain types of meetings. I took part in a recent survey by the Grassroots Research group that found respondents expected an average 22% drop in meetings attendees this year. One travel manager from France that was polled cut corporate travel spend by 30%, due in part to increased use of videoconferencing. Wow!
More and more news stories seem to want to declare the bottom of the decline or even the end of the recession. While this is the news many of us are longing to see and I’m hopeful the next year will be one of recovery, what does this mean for the business travel industry?
