Solving pain points for corporate event travel

Meetings and events are powerful tools for sharing ideas, deepening relationships, and building strong team cultures. It’s no wonder that meetings and events accounted for nearly 40% of business travel spending in the U.S. in 2022 according to the U.S. Travel Association. 

Unfortunately, managing travel for meetings and events can be tremendously complex and time consuming. Event managers need tools that make it easier to plan events, save on travel costs, and craft better experiences for attendees. 

Here are solutions for the top four pain points facing corporate meeting and event managers in 2024.

Pain point 1: Empowering attendees to book and manage their own travel

Managing employee travel adds a major layer of complexity to any corporate event. As workforces have shifted to a hybrid model, bringing employees together is more complicated and important than ever before.

Forget spreadsheets and one-off email conversations to manage travel bookings. Spotnana Events makes it easy to invite an unlimited number of employees and guests to book and manage their own travel for meetings and events. 

In less than a minute, company meeting planners and event managers can set travel restrictions that control what travelers book, including travel windows, designated airports and/or hotels, and which payment methods are used. 

Event planners can, for instance, require travelers to book with specific preferred suppliers using your negotiated rates and fares, or deny the ability for attendees to book a rental car while they’re in destination. If a room block has been secured, event planners can prevent self-service hotel room bookings and use the manifest reporting capabilities in Spotnana to coordinate stays.

Spotnana Events is built on top of Spotnana’s award-winning Travel-as-a-Service platform, enabling travelers to access the widest possible array of global content options from Spotnana’s industry-leading NDC connections, direct connections with airlines, integrations with Expedia and Booking.com, and more. 

Spotnana’s powerful self-service tools empower travelers to change and cancel elements of their trip on their own, reducing complexity for attendees and saving time for event managers who traditionally have to step in to manage changes with a TMC. When travelers do need help, they can receive service 24/7 via chat, phone, and email from agents who have full visibility into event details, policies, and payment methods.

Pain point 2: Managing guest travel

Booking non-employee guest travel for your corporate meetings and events typically requires time-intensive manual tasks. Guest bookings are frequently managed offline via a TMC, because  most travel platforms require a traveler to have an existing profile in their system before a booking can be made. 

Spotnana Events makes it easy to invite external guests to an event through an email with a link for guests to book their own travel based on policies you set in advance. Functionality like this allows you to fly VIPs to events in business class, for instance, and limit others to economy airfares.

Payments can be a pain point for the external guests you invite to an event if they have to pay for travel out-of-pocket with their credit card and be reimbursed at a later date. With Spotnana Events, event managers can define corporate payment methods in advance, including company cards and virtual cards, eliminating the need for reimbursement. 

After a guest books a trip, their RSVP status and travel information appears in the same dashboard as every other event attendee, providing event managers with a comprehensive view of attendee status and travel spend.

Pain point 3: Planning events for groups of different sizes

More than three-in-four meeting planners told Skift Meetings that events are now planned with shorter lead times than before Covid.

On short notice, event planners are often tasked with planning meetings for groups of different sizes without technology that scales to their needs.

Most corporate event management platforms support only a small number of invitees. Consequently, corporate planners are forced to do copious manual work in spreadsheets for their events, due to a lack of intuitive tools.

Spotnana Events supports groups of unlimited size. Planners can easily add or upload a list of travelers to invite, including both employees and non-employee guest travelers, and then invite attendees to book their own travel.

Our event pages and emails are easy to configure in a matter of seconds. Event managers can input an event’s name and description along with an image for the event, or generate an image using AI.

All guests receive an invitation email that prompts them to begin the travel booking process immediately.  It’s simple to send reminder emails to those who haven’t RSVP’d and add additional invitees once an event has been created.

Pain point 4: Reducing travel costs for events.

Meeting planners are often asked to do more with smaller budgets. Over one-third saw a reduction in their 2023 budget when compared to the previous year, according to Skift Meetings. 

Spotnana Events eliminates the need to manage event travel through costly offline TMC bookings, reduces TMC agent contact fees through powerful self-service trip management capabilities, provides access to Spotnana’s best-in-class travel content including direct NDC integrations with lower-priced fares, makes it easy to enforce low-cost booking choices through travel policies, and provides real-time insight into event travel spend.

Administrators can view event spending information, check RSVP details, and make changes to events at any time.

Spotnana Events can be added to an existing Spotnana customer deployment or purchased as a standalone offering, providing corporations with an easy way to get started with Spotnana’s modern travel platform.

Want to learn more about self-service corporate event travel with Spotnana Events? Get a demo of Spotnana today.