SINGAPORE Business travel and meetings and events specialist Carlson Wagonlit Travel (CWT) has rolled out its new CWT Meeting Optimizer, a new software designed to help individual organisers and professional meeting planners plan their events.
Available to all company clients through the CWT portal, the online tool acts like a search engine that goes through a database of more than 14 million hotel transactions and 34 million air transactions, covering nearly 2,000 global destinations, to help determine the smartest and most cost-effective location for their next offsite function.
Users only need to key in the number of participants, event dates and preferred locations. Short-listing options include destinations by costs of flights, costs of hotel, mileage or even carbon emissions.
“We have developed a tool that is easy to use and ideal for any type of meeting or event regardless of budget, size or locality of attendees. Most importantly, it will help address our clients’ desire to manage meeting and event spend within the travel program framework that delivers financial savings and productivity efficiencies,” said Mike Bezer, vice-president, of CWT Global Sales, Asia-Pacific, said:
By using CWT Meeting Optimizer, event planners can get up to 25 per cent savings on meeting and event expenses. This is based on CWT’s benchmarking test of 15 hypothetical international meetings in 2011 – one estimated cost without the use of a planning tool and the other enlisted the help of the new software.
With this online tool, companies have a centrally managed tool enabling them to better track their overall spend on meetings and events.
In Asia-Pacific, CWT offices are located in Australia, Hong Kong, India and Singapore, among others.
Randall Sim
