Using Travel Integrations to Get Attendees To and From Your Event

Editor's Notes

• #3: Benefits of Managing Attendee Travel within Your Planning Team Show of hands – who currently uses a travel agency or GDS to manage attendee or speaker travel for your events Show of hands – who is using integration with their provider now – into their expense system/Cvent/other CRM
• #4: Why would you want to take on travel management? It sounds terrible! Here’s the thing. You are going to have to devote some time to set your integration up and make it work the way that you want. It will take more time than you want it to, you will curse that your old system was not quite broken and you will sit on conference calls with tech folks that will drive you crazy. I’m here to tell you that it’s all worth it. And that you are not alone. Your GDS account manager will help you. Your Cvent account rep will help you. And people like me will help you. I can’t overstate how important it is to get connected with planners that have integrated their travel systems with Cvent. While the people on both sides of integration are incredibly knowledgeable, you should talk to someone that speaks YOUR language. Ask all your vendors if you can speak with another client, post in the Cvent community, ask your professional associations, etc. Find your flock!
• #5: It’s not! (screen shot crazy emails/spreadsheets and pristine reports) Always know when your people are coming and going If your organization is paying, this will help keep track of the spend If your organization is not paying, you will still know when and how everyone is arriving and departing. This will help you schedule ground transportation (buses to black cars), manage your F&B guarantees and plan your agenda.
• #6: My current GDS is GetThere – Here is how I am set up and my best practices How did I get here? Until about 18 months ago, I used a different travel vendor and would send out booking information as part of my confirmation emails. Now I can have attendees book as part of their registration process and run reports on each event to see who has booked. All of your attendees have different travel needs? No problem – time to set some travel parameters. This will differ system to system, but should be possible with all of the major booking tools. VIPs Price/Date/Time Restrictions Paying for the speakers but not for the attendees Can someone book their honeymoon on my meeting account? Anticipate a lot of changes to travel requests? Don’t forget to set up a planner alert. Do your attendees book their hotel rooms according to the default dates, even if those are not their actual travel dates? Mine do. Check your travel manifest against your rooming list by running two quick reports – make no shows a thing of the past!
• #7: This is one of my favorites - Itinerary by Invitee
• #8: Does your organization have a travel policy for your employees? Probably. Does it address your event attendees? Why not? Two avenues to explore as you talk to your bosses – what is your duty of care to your attendees should something happen while they are traveling to/from or onsite at your event? And how much extra time and money are you spending without a travel system in place? If you are onsite or getting ready to go onsite and there is a disaster, you have a good head start on whatever your next steps are going to be. Having a big opening or closing reception? Would it be awesome to know how many people are going to be in town for those events? Yes! With more accurate guarantees you are saving lots of $$$ Will people always try to jump on earlier planes, sure, but you can’t control everything (even though we want to)
• #9: Ground transportation Schedule your airport shuttle buses to run more frequently or add more inventory during heavy arrival and departure times. If you have been asking your attendees to email you their itinerary and tracking it in a spreadsheet – you can delete that spreadsheet. You are getting so many planning hours back! Are your VIPs known for making last minute changes, not telling you and then calling you confused when the car is not there for them at 1pm…because you still thought they were arriving at 6pm? No more. You will look like a wizard.