According to recent estimates, two-thirds of all travel meetings and events programs will be fully consolidated by 2019. Today, according to GBTA research, 84% of travel managers and occasional planners use OTAs to shop groups and meetings.
Against this backdrop, Groupize, a provider of simple meetings technology solutions, has launched platform functionality that enables corporations and TMCs to combine and consolidate their transient and meetings negotiated hotel programs. The goal is to eliminate friction for both corporations and hotels by simplifying the RFP process and moving it to an availability request for simple meetings.
Groupize allows occasional and professional planners to 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.
Traditionally, Travel as well as the simple and complex meetings processes have 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. According to various sources, this is resulting in an increased convergence of transient travel and meetings trend amongst corporate travel programs.
Among the benefits, corporate customers of the Groupize platform can pre-populated rich transient and meeting content at 150,000 properties worldwide with the ability to activate preferred chains or properties to simplify and limit the number of qualified results. They can add and display meetings preferred designation, manage sort order and display for preferred hotel, display transient negotiated rates and meetings rates side by side. display pre-negotiated meeting packages company wide and re-attach global contracts and copy GSOs for participating hotel chains.