Award-winning simple meetings tech innovator debuts enhanced functionality to harness the convergence of transient and meetings in one integrated solution.
BOSTON, MA – Groupize, the award-winning provider of innovative, simple meetings technology solutions, showcased their latest advancements at ACTE’s 2018 Montreal Global Summit & Corporate Lodging Forum. The launched their pioneering functionality which enables corporations and TMC’s to combine and consolidate their transient and meetings negotiated hotel programs.
Travel, as well as the simple and complex meetings processes have historically been managed by separate teams, in separate technology systems with no connection between the content and the data. With increasing supplier pricing and decreasing meetings commissions, corporate buyers are looking to increase their negotiation power with suppliers by leveraging their combined volume. This is resulting in an increased convergence of transient travel and meetings trend amongst corporate travel programs.
A recent GBTA research estimates that if consolidation continues at this pace, two-thirds of all travel, meetings and events programs will be fully consolidated by 2019. Corporate customers of the Groupize end-to-end platform can now benefit from:
- One-time set-up at the account or organization level
- Pre-populated rich transient and meeting content at 150,000 properties worldwide
- Ability to activate preferred chains or properties to simplify and limit the number of qualified results
- Provide users with access to corporate transient rate and TMC consortia hotel programs in real time
- Add and display meetings preferred designation
- Manage sort order and display for preferred hotels
- Ability to display transient negotiated rates and meetings rates side by side
- Add promotional text to a property or chain
- Display pre-negotiated meeting packages company wide
- Pre-attach global contracts and copy GSOs for participating hotel chains
- Integration to SAP Concur to push hotel booking data
“There’s been a lot of talk around the convergence of transient and meetings over the years,” says Charles de Gaspe Beaubien, CEO of Groupize. “We are capitalizing on that trend, and it is our mission to be the leading fully integrated solution that can finally deliver on that promise of these consolidated travel and meetings initiatives. We want less talk and more actual consolidation.”
Per a GBTA research, 84% of travel managers and occasional planners use OTA’s to shop groups and meetings. Now, occasional and professional planners can have access to a curated list of properties with the same quality content, images, and meeting room information. More importantly, properties can be highlighted as preferred and display side by side the negotiated transient rates and meetings packages. In seconds, planners can request availability for these pre-negotiated packages. The process is removing major friction for both corporations and hotels by simplifying the outdated RFP process and moving it to an availability request for these simple meetings.
Additionally, travel managers have been reluctant to date to use the meetings part of the GBTA RFP, as there was nowhere to enter the data and share it companywide. Moving forward, travel managers can request this information from suppliers as part of their annual RFP process and actually make the offers available to their users and benefit from the savings.
Vicky is the co-founder of TravelDailyNews Media Network where she is the Editor-in Chief. She is also responsible for the daily operation and the financial policy. She holds a Bachelor's degree in Tourism Business Administration from the Technical University of Athens and a Master in Business Administration (MBA) from the University of Wales.
She has many years of both academic and industrial experience within the travel industry. She has written/edited numerous articles in various tourism magazines.
