Successful Meetings - September 2008 - (Page 34) Planner’s Workshop > Pre-Event required to seek approval and a form for such a process is a useful best practice shared by many of our customers. Supplier contracts are very comprehensive and require professional supervision (your lawyer, a professional planner with contract management experience). Cancellation clauses, attrition clauses, and responsibility clauses are negotiable and if not looked after can create liabilities no organization would want. Systems for paying for and tracking total travel event costs (usually broken out by elements such as number of hotel room nights booked, total hotel dollars spent, average room rate, food and beverage totals, costs per individual, and other meeting components) are an opportunity to consider and establish your policy. This data can be useful to negotiate strong meeting and transient travel agreements in the future. A way to secure this data is to establish a master account broken down by these key indicators. Consider using credit card payment cards which will do the same and deliver cash flow, or establishing project codes attached to all expenses (project codes for a specific meeting for example distributed to all suppliers: air, hotel, transportation, audio visual, etc.). Establishing your financial system in advance allows you to increase efficiencies, secure data with which to ascertain historical financial value of a meeting for future negotiations, and allows for benchmarking to determine success and future policy adjustments. Most benchmarks compare your supplier averages for air, hotel, and others against national averages. Consider the following questions: What is our financial management system for meetings and are all of our planners following it? Do we have a defined system to review suppliers’ contracts? Do we have all the financial data we need— broken down in key expense areas—to negotiate better individual or overall agreements? How do our annual meeting expenses compare to national averages? Michael MacNair owns MacNair Travel Management, a travel and leadership consulting firm in Alexandria, VA. A regular industry spokesperson and author of the book Smooth Landings, MacNair conducts travel management seminars, sharing best practices. To contact him, visit www.macnairtravel.com. Control is one of the key benefits to travel and meeting management and in this area controls must be established. We have found it important to establish budgets for pre-approved annual meetings and authorization processes for ad hoc meetings. Defining what data is Understanding creates Networking. Networking creates Experience. Experience creates Knowledge. Knowledge creates Technology. Technology creates Convenience. Convenience creates Well-being. Well-being creates Feeling. Feeling creates Motivation. Motivation creates Participation. Participation creates Meetings. Meeting creates Understanding! www.austrian.com www.acv.at www.messecongress.at www.vienna.convention.at SEPTEMBER 2008 SUCCESSFUL MEETINGS http://www.vienna.convention.at http://www.austrian.com http://www.acv.at http://www.messecongress.at http://www.vienna.convention.at http://www.macnairtravel.com
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