Everyone thought meetings would be the last segment to
recover from the Covid-19 travel freeze. Not so—demand for group business,
which for hotels and venues generally includes social as well as corporate
groups—is flying high in the second half of 2022. That means corporate travel
and meetings managers will need to get sharper with their negotiation skills,
aggressive with timelines and have backup options if their first choice of
location doesn’t work out.
It also means they may need to review meetings strategy and
what has changed during the pandemic to impact how and why their companies are
holding meetings.
The transition to remote work has yet to play out fully in
the marketplace, but until it does, corporations will be caught between an old
world that drives culture from a traditional center of gravity and a new world
that needs to cultivate values, create bonding experiences and facilitate
face-to-face interactions in different ways. For a lot of companies that will
be meetings—and they may be more frequent and have new objectives than before.
They may be planned centrally or independently within a department.
Understanding how meetings now fit into the larger corporate strategy—whether
with clients or with employees—is a new and exciting wrinkle that is likely to
change meetings policy, process and platforms.
Do meetings policies apply to both internal and external
meetings—and should the policies and meeting experience be the same? Are
sourcing processes and approval patterns agile enough to encompass meetings
both small and large? Do you have providers and technologies that make virtual
or hybrid elements—which exploded during the pandemic—a switch-on/switch-off
option for meeting organizers? Is it easy for meeting organizers to follow the
rules? And, underpinning all of that, are you collecting the right data to
support your management strategy?
If you’re getting started on this journey,
you’re in the right place.