Expand your Meetings Intelligence
The Meetings Intelligence Exchange is an online business intelligence exchange for meeting industry professionals that features user-generated content in the form of reviews written by meeting planning members about the meeting suppliers and facilities they have experienced. The review requires members to critique a supplier’s performance on a five point Expectation Scale for 13 criteria that our Industry Advisory Board identified as critical to a meetings success. Since these reviews are authored by meeting professional professionals who have personally experienced a supplier’s performance the Meetings Intelligence Exchange will become a valued resource for gathering performance intelligence and aims to be premier provider or reliable and trusted performance intelligence for the global meetings industry.
Following the recent introduction of their website and their Meeting Professional and Meeting Supplier Performance Dashboards Bill Gamble, Managing Partner of Carefree Marketing spoke with Tim Ryan, Founder of the Meetings Intelligence Exchange about its products and benefits to the meetings industry.
Q: Meetings Intelligence Exchange recently introduced their online Meetings Intelligence Performance Dashboards for meeting professionals and meeting industry suppliers. What makes these products special?
A: We recognize the challenges that meeting professionals face. They’re being asked to plan more meetings with the same budget as last year. They’re planning more international meetings where they don’t have relationships with trusted suppliers. They’re outsourcing more. They’re being evaluated on the success and the ROI of each meeting. And they’re extremely busy. If these issues aren’t challenging enough they really don’t know if a hotel supplier will deliver on their promises.
Our meetings industry advisory board has identified thirteen criteria that make or break a meeting. Our meeting planning members have agreed to critique each property they use against this criteria and share their experiences and opinions with other meeting professional members.
Our experience in the industry taught us that meeting planning professionals value the opinions and experiences of their peers. We’re providing them the platform to share their intelligence and capture the intelligence that’s important to them through our performance dashboards.
Q: Why is it so important that users have easier access to performance data?
A: It’s not just important it’s essential. For the most effective, insightful decisions meeting professionals need a complete picture about the properties they’re considering. Currently they gather information from national sales offices, representation companies, industry publications, and conduct site inspections. This is a time consuming process. We’re offering meeting professionals a fast, affordable way to obtain up to date performance information in an easy to understand format. We feel that the Meetings Intelligence Exchange will revolutionize the way meeting professionals gather performance intelligence and data on hotels.
Q: What are you doing to ensure that the information is accurate?
A: We are committed to preventing fake and fraudulent reviews and have established a number of checks and balances to protect the integrity of the Meetings Intelligence Exchange.
First, only approved meeting planning members have the privilege to post a review of a property. Meeting professionals apply for membership and their application is reviewed by our Meetings Industry Advisory Board. Since this is a “peer to peer” exchange most meeting professionals who apply for membership are referred by other meeting professionals or meeting industry suppliers.
Second, we approve every review prior to it being published to ensure that it meets our guidelines. Once the review is approved it will be published and available to all meeting planning members and only the meeting industry subscriber who represents the property.
Third, we will periodically call meeting planning members and meeting industry subscribers to verify the opinions and experiences expressed in a review. In the rare instances when we identify a fake or fraudulent review we will prevent it from being published and remove it from the exchange. The meeting planning member who submitted the review will forfeit their membership and lose all access to the Meetings Intelligence Exchange.
Q: Can you give us an example of how the Meetings Intelligence Exchange works?
A: Sure. Meeting Professional members have agreed to use our review to critique the performance of each property they use for a meeting. This critique reflects the planners’ expectations, experiences, insights and opinions. Our database of planner property reviews is expected to grow rapidly and as you can imagine will contain a lot of great information.
Our performance dashboards allow our members to quickly capture and compile timely information in many unique ways. For example if a member is considering holding a meeting in San Francisco they can search our database of hotels. Our search results are prioritized by the performance rating that our meeting professional members have established based on their experiences and are not based on advertising. Planners can then review the detailed performance results for each of the thirteen criteria that our Meetings Industry Advisory Board has deemed important to the success of a meeting, conduct side by side comparisons of interested hotels and receive updates when a hotels performance ratings change. Our reports can then be used to support a planner’s recommendation with their leadership team. There are also many other useful tools for planners to capture timely intelligence on industry suppliers.
Our performance dashboards will allow members to capture relevant, timely information in record time, make better informed decisions, and increase the likelihood of managing an exceptional meeting.
