CWT launches Meeting Optimizer

Carlson Wagonlit Travel (CWT) has launched the CWT Meeting Optimizer for all CWT clients. This is the first in a series of meetings products to be introduced in 2012 as a complementary offering to CWT Meetings & Events. CWT Meeting Optimizer was developed in partnership with Starcite, part of Active Network, and a leader in strategic meetings management. The CWT Meeting Optimizer helps individual organizers and professional meeting planners easily find the best location for a meeting of any size. To plan a meeting, meeting arrangers simply enter the number of participants, their locations and the meeting dates. CWT Meeting Optimizer then generates a list of worldwide destinations, including tele-presence rooms, to give meeting organizers a prioritized list of places to hold their meeting. Using CWT’s extensive range of data — over14 million hotel transactions and 34 million air transactions — CWT Meeting Optimizer instantly compares nearly 2,000 global destinations to determine the smartest and most cost-effective meeting destination. CWT calculated the cost of 15 hypothetical international meetings in 2011 using no planning tool, and then estimated the cost of the same meeting benchmarked and planned using CWT Meeting Optimizer. The results showed that an average saving of 25% percent could have been achieved. Based on a study conducted by the CWT Travel Management Institute, companies spend on average almost 1.5% of their annual revenues on meetings and events, yet this budget is difficult to track because meetings are not always managed centrally. With CWT Meeting Optimizer, planning meetings becomes an integral part of a company’s travel program as the tool will be accessible through CWT’s exclusive client interface, CWT Portal. Go to http://www.carlsonwagonlit.com for more.