Hosting an informative and fun gathering for your clients and colleagues is a massive task, from creating a schedule and ensuring that its executed properly, to the even more stressful task of staying on budget. Planning a meeting or event becomes almost unmanageable, especially for a single person.
If you and your team are overwhelmed with meeting planning duties, consider working with a third-party meeting planner to make your meeting & events program simple and streamlined. Here are a few of the many reasons to collaborate with a meetings and events industry expert.
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Timesaving
If Meeting planning isn’t your full-time job, but you’ve been asked to schedule your company’s next event. How will you fit this new task into your day? What technology will you use to plan it? How will you effectively communicate with attendees? How much will you charge each attendee, if you plan to charge? What part of the country/world should you research? How do you create a budget? Time management is critical, and juggling each of these needs on your own without prior experience is next to impossible.
Turn to the experts. Professional third-party planners start with your meeting goals. They then help you create a budget, source and recommend destinations and hotels, and give you suggestions and a timeline on where to begin. Third party planners help you start, guide you throughout the meeting process, find your technology solution(s), provide on-site meeting management, and be there at the finish with you to analyze the event’s ROI, savings, and survey results.
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Expertise
How do I know if I’m receiving the lowest hotel rate or the lowest airfare and saving my company money? How would I determine the best hotel/location for my meeting? Where are safe places to travel? How do I know what the safety requirements are for my destination? These are all important questions that can be difficult to answer without the help of a professional planner.
Turn to the experts. Professional third-party planners bring their own unique perspective with a deep knowledge of the industry and a commitment to excellent customer service. The most qualified planners have spent many years negotiating contracts, doing air analysis, running comparison reports, and educating themselves on the event industry. One of their goals is to keep abreast of all changes, trends, and savings methodologies to recommend the best viable options to all our customers and customize solutions to fit your event requirements.
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Technology
Remember the days of tracking attendees via an excel sheet or sending out BCC emails? They’re over, and today’s meetings and events landscape is dominated by a new wave of easy-to-use technologies. You’ll need to be up to date on the latest registration, website, booking and virtual meeting programs.
Turn to the experts. Planners have solutions! World Meetings and Events is a subsidiary of World Travel, Inc. with 26 meeting professionals, which include meeting planners, meeting technology experts, and group air consultants. All our meetings and events professionals have at least 15 years of experience and are well-versed in the latest technology. One of our technology partners is Cvent, which has evolved over the years from registration websites to mobile apps, to adding other technology integrations, such as the GDS and Passkey. Their latest offering is the Virtual Attendee Hub for virtual or hybrid meetings. We have been designing and developing registration websites, mobile apps, and now virtual meetings technology in order to provide your attendees with a customized meeting process from start to finish with specific branding for your group. We also work with other virtual meeting technology partners that offer a variety of options from web-based webinars, to virtual venues and avatars, to full production, depending on how you’d like to design your event’s attendee experience.
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Cost-Savings
Maximizing cost savings has always been an important and complicated aspect of event planning. It’s been made even more complicated by changing policies during the coronavirus pandemic. Turn to the experts.
The World Meetings and Events planning process includes providing an ROI for each meeting. This is a line-by-line excel document which highlights what WME was able to negotiate for you and shows you the total meeting savings. We review what concessions are important to you and negotiate the best hotel/supplier contract terms available. Our airfare savings reports along with spend are automatically created and sent to you. Our goal is to save you time and money throughout the planning process. We’ll provide you with ROI savings on contract negotiation, to air savings reports and up-to-the-minute participation reports and survey results. Working with a professional third-party planner can take the confusion and complexity out of the meeting and event planning process.
Make the most of every opportunity to wow your clients and colleagues by turning to the experts.
