5 Steps to Reduce Ground Transportation Costs at Your Next Event
Selecting the best ground transportation solution for your next event is not just about the quote for vehicles. In fact, when designing an effective ground transportation program for your next event, vehicle costs are only the beginning.
Below are 5 important steps that you need to take in order to control, and ultimately reduce, your final transportation costs:
| Selecting a Transportation Company: Selecting the right ground transportation operator is a critical piece in creating a successful and cost-effective ground transportation program. Planners will often look at just price when selecting a vendor. It is more important to conduct due diligence before selecting a ground transportation vendor. You will want to confirm that they can meet, or exceed, all corporate requirements for vehicle condition, driver qualification, safety record and insurance coverage. Confirming Flights: John Q Executive is arriving on flight AA 242 at 8:05 am, or is he? As we all know, it is not uncommon for flight information to be entered incorrectly during the registration process. Confirming flight information is a critical step to ensuring that your attendee and his/her transportation show up at the same time! Be certain that the ground transportation vendor you select will confirm, verify and track all flights on your manifest.Grouping Attendees: Grouping arriving and departing attendees is one of the most significant ways for you to realize cost savings as it allows you to optimize the number and sizes of vehicles needed. Once all flights have been confirmed, there will be changes, often causing you to spend hours staring at screens and Excel spreadsheets to group together travelers who are going to/from the same airport/location and have similar flight times. Being able to rely on a collaborative ground transportation partner to handle all of the changes and adjusting “wait times” accordingly will assist you in creating the grouping plan that works best for your attendees and budget. Tracking Flights: Reconcile Invoices: If this all of this sounds like a lot of work, it is! This is why I was so intrigued when I found the miMeetings booth tucked away in the back of the recent IMEX show in Las Vegas. miMeetings has developed a cloud platform that assists with the RFP process, has a patented technology that confirms flight information to avoid errors, a second patented technology to group attendees based on wait times, optimizes vehicle utilization and even allows Planners to create and review potential savings based on different scenarios- all within in seconds! miMeetings is able to reconcile the vendor invoice, provide an understandable invoice, savings report and an HCP as required. To learn more about the transportation solutions offered by miMeetings you can visit them at https://mimeetings.com/tour/ |
