After months of social distancing, canceled flights, and video call after video call, people are starting to ask, “When can we travel again?” For many companies, it’s not just a few employees asking. Travel is vital for things like collaborating with your team, forming client relationships, and making sales. While video is certainly better than nothing, we’re all being constantly reminded that some meetings are just better face-to-face.
Although it may feel like the no-travel rules will go on forever, many organizations have already resumed business travel and even more anticipate getting back on the road sometime soon.
While Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management’s study shows that travelers only have a 0.0001% chance of catching COVID on a plane where middle seats are blocked and masks are enforced, meeting planners still admit that there are some obstacles they’d need to overcome to resume in-person meetings.
BTN surveyed meeting planners over the summer and 93% of them said favorable or flexible cancellation/attrition terms would be one of the biggest deciding factors for them as they begin to plan for future meetings. Additionally, 89% said that their confidence in duty-of-care components, focused on attendee health and safety, would be another big factor.
Based on that, we’re confident our recent updates to Gant Together, offers planners what they are looking for to start scheduling future meeting travel.
Gant Together is our end-to-end meetings tool that makes meeting planning simple. We combined our industry-leading technology with our award-winning service to give planners the tools they need to re-start in-person meetings in a world that includes COVID-19.
How Gant Together Works
With Gant Together, meeting organizers can build meetings directly from our client portal. They can set the meeting basics, design the invitation and registration pages, create custom registration questions, send invites and track responses, and apply policy constraints to the whole meeting, by attendee group, or even by each individual attendee. That includes setting air travel parameters, approved dates of travel, a meeting fare cap, virtual or travelling, and more. Plus, Gant Together allows planners to enter a corporate credit card for all charges (or just some of them, again, based on entered policy). Gant Together reporting includes manifests for air and hotel, registration and invitation status by attendee, and a live-data dashboard – so everything is in one place.
Duty of Care Tools
While Gant Together makes it easy to build out all meeting details, set a meeting-level policy, and book travel, Gant Together also includes tools to aid with Duty of Care – one of the most important topics for meeting planners moving forward. Gant Together provides planners with analytic dashboards that offer extensive reporting with single meeting and roll-up views, flight and hotel manifests, and emailed alerts throughout. It’s also easy to integrate Gant Together with Travelers on the Road, our interactive mapping and reporting tool that allows planners to stay ahead of impending health risks by knowing where their travelers coming from, to, and through to get to the meeting.
Easy Replication
The ability to clone any part of a meeting is perfect for planners who need to schedule (or reschedule) similar meetings over and over again. While the travel industry continues to give travelers more flexibility, meeting planners know it’s a hassle to build out a new invitation and set a new policy each time travel is rescheduled – regardless of how lax the airline or property cancellation policies are. However, with Gant Together, planners don’t have to worry about any of that. It’s easy to design an invitation, set policy constraints, invite attendees, and then replicate all of them later if plans change. Once planners create a meeting, they never have to build it again because Gant Together allows planners to clone, edit, update, and move on to the next step in the process.
Virtual and Hybrid Meeting Tools
In addition to in-person meetings, Gant Together now makes it easy to plan virtual meetings as well. Plus, as organizations start to travel again, it’s likely that more and more meetings will have a hybrid structure where some meeting participants meet in person and other participants join virtually. Whether you’re planning on meeting face-to-face, completely virtually, or having a mixture of the two, Gant Together has the tools you need to get everyone where they need to be. Plus, planners can either assign virtual/in-person or even allow attendees to choose whether they will be joining the meeting virtually or in-person when they register.
Face-to-face meetings play a significant role in the business world, and although not every company has resumed business travel, we will all be back on the road again soon. Gant Together has the tools meeting planners need to effectively handle their team travel in a world that includes COVID-19. Travel and meetings have always gone together – and they will continue to go together as we continue to recover from the outbreak.
Let Gant Together help you reschedule all those missed meetings – however you plan to get together.
