As business travel regains its footing in response to changing corporate needs and shifting travel patterns, new strategies and diverse approaches to hotel sourcing are emerging.  

As meeting volume continues to pick up steam in 2022, planners are managing organizational expectations and budgets while navigating in a new landscape defined by a return of in-person events, changing attendee expectations, steep cost increases, compressed lead times on RFPs, staffing shortages, and limits on hotel and venue availability. Increasingly, many are finding that they must reevaluate their old processes to be successful.

Just as some leading corporations began rolling out new approaches and technologies to more quickly and conveniently source and book simple meetings, the world of meetings took a long pause. As meetings resume, pressure is mounting for more efficient and expedient ways to book such meetings.

The shift to remote and hybrid work models has prompted companies to rethink travel policies and payment strategies
with a digital-first mindset.

Virtual cards are emerging as one of many digital payment solutions gaining traction in his new working environment, with virtual card transactions expected to grow 340 percent in the next five years; increasing from 8 billion in 2022 to more than 121 billion in 2027, according to a September 2022 report by analyst firm Juniper Research.

Over the past two years, the roles and responsibilities of meeting managers have undergone a rapid evolution in response to dramatic changes in event venues and formats, and the technologies and resources needed to make them effective. This report examines some of the key forces reshaping how meeting managers work, and the skill sets needed to meeting the demands of their job.

The countless ways in which 2020 has proven a year without precedent for business travel managers won’t confine themselves to this calendar year. The shutdown of most types of business travel due to the global COVID-19 pandemic has left most organizations with only a sliver of their typical business travel volume in 2020, a fact that is complicating negotiations for corporate hotel rates for 2021.

With so little volume booked in 2020, how can travel buyers and hoteliers sufficiently assess the state of a hotel program to negotiate fair deals for 2021? Moreover, how can 2021 hotel volume be forecasted in a manner that allows for the negotiation of rates when so much remains uncertain? This white paper is designed to explore the possibilities available to travel buyers when constructing a 2021 hotel program and negotiating corporate rates, including forecasting amid the pandemic, the best ways to manage what seems to be a partial return to business travel in 2021, and the types of negotiated hotel rates perhaps best suited for a year that features so much uncertainty.  

Directing a strategic meetings management program in 2020 has been an exercise without precedent, as the COVID-19 pandemic all but shut down face-to-face meetings in many world regions. It’s a situation that even the most skilled and experienced practitioner couldn’t possibly have foreseen in designing and deploying an SMM program. Yet, practitioners have found that some of the core tenants of SMM — centralized events calendar, standardized, if not centralized contracts, duty of care and reporting — have proven invaluable as they navigated the rapid changes in 2020. Others identified opportunities to refine policies, practices, data, reporting and services.