Improved expertise and technology are enabling organizations to capture and deal with their meetings expenditure more effectively than ever before.

An estimated $325 billion is spent annually on corporate meetings, incentives, conventions and events (MICE), of which the US and Europe account for roughly $120 billion each.

MICE usually represents 25-40 percent of a company’s total travel spend and yet, says BCD Meetings & Incentives president Scott Graf, nearly 70 percent of global companies cannot or do not accurately identify their meetings spend, mainly because they fail to track as many as four out of five events that they organize.

Both the size of the meetings market and the difficulty of measuring and managing it explain why Graf describes MICE as the last frontier of travel management. Graf believes that is changing fast, if only because of a growing appreciation of how important an area of spend this is. According to Graf, meetings are more important then ever based on the rapid evolution of telecommuting and more of a global world. It is critically important for leaders and managers to get together to personally interact with employees, customers and supply partners.

Fortunately, buyers are understanding not only how much of a problem MICE spend is but also that there are solutions available to them. One part of the solution is to apply the same strategic management processes that they have already used successfully for managing transient travel spend. This includes using professionals such as BCD Meetings & Incentives which have grown a significant base of expertise in MICE to match their knowledge in corporate travel. Clients are telling us: I’ve seen you control our transient travel; please repeat the same for our meetings spend, says Graf. BCD Travel’s meetings subsidiary, BCD Meetings & Incentives, now has 350 employees and operates in nearly 30 countries.

The other resource available to MICE managers is technology. Tools have appeared on the market that help buyers and meeting planners to organize every step of an event and monitor overall expenditure. One such provider is StarCite, BCD Meetings & Incentives strategic technology partner.

When organizing a meeting, an online tool can help with the following tasks:

Plan plot scope of meeting and gain approval

Budget build budget and manage expenditure

Buy build, conduct and review RFPs

Attend create registration site to market the event and manage bookings for the event itself as well as travel, accommodation and entertainment

Measure includes expenditure reports, benchmarks and return on investment calculator

Using technology of this kind can help push companies towards significant savings, says Graf. In the case of businesses which have never previously attempted to manage their MICE spend, this could easily amount to a cost reduction in the order of 18 percent. It often proves to be the case that unmanaged companies have not previously even negotiated attractive group rates and consistent terms and conditions with hotels. Graf describes tackling accommodation as well as food and beverage as easy pickings but also substantial ones because they often represent more than three-quarters of the cost of an event, if air fares are not included.

With savings as substantial as these possible, many more companies can be expected to join the trend for capturing the MICE in their organizations.

Tags: conventions, MICE

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This entry was posted on Monday, June 4th, 2007 at 4:54 pm and is filed under Events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.