New meetings technology tools designed to streamline the RFP process and offer greater scope and efficiency in making rate comparisons were announced at the recent National Business Travel Association International Convention and Expo at the Los Angeles Convention Center.
New from Worktopia Inc. is Universal Meeting Solution (UMS), which enables users to search, compare and book space for simple meetings as well as arrange for catering, audiovisual equipment, overnight accommodations, and other amenities in one online session. In addition, UMS provides attendee management capabilities, detailed meeting activity reports and enhanced user enrollment tools.
For companies that have pre-negotiated contracts with hotels, Worktopia offers the UMS-Corporate Edition, which loads company-designated rates and other travel-related corporate guidelines into the system.
According to Worktopia CEO John Arenas, UMS is designed to provide “unprecedented visibility” into what companies are spending on small, simple meetings and allow for improved planning and control.
“Companies have developed excellent spending controls over everyday business trips but still have virtually no central control over the booking process for simple meetings,” he said. “Worktopia now provides the means to measure overall expenditures for simple business meetings, ensure regulatory compliance, enforce sound procurement practices, and generate savings for discounts based on volumes with each supplier.”
Also at the convention, StarCite Inc. unveiled its StarCite Group Rate Advisor Report, which is designed to equip meeting planners with hotel rate forecasts using meeting planning data from RFPs flowing through StarCite’s meeting platform.
The offering allows planners to analyze hotel options and make decisions based on pricing trends as well as historical information. Using data collected from its database, StarCite can produce reports for any city or geographical region that will provide sleeping room rate ranges and trends as far as twelve months in advance.
Both StarCite’s forward-looking data and historical averages are based on electronic RFPs that have been processed through the StarCite marketplace, which contains over 93,000 suppliers and has more than $7.5 billion of corporate meeting opportunities moving through the system each year.
Once compiled, the data generated by these customer-hotel interactions allows StarCite to provide reports on the aggregated rates being offered in metro regions, by type of property and by industry vertical of the company requesting the meetings. Reports will only be available if there are a minimum of five properties to include in the data set. Pricing information on individual properties will not be available.
Planners can purchase specific reports individually or become a subscriber to receive regular reports.
