Meeting location advice as a TMC service

A travel management company can advise its corporate clients on where a meeting should take place before anyone books a trip. You rank the candidate cities by travel cost, CO2 and door-to-door travel time, using the client's travel policy and negotiated rates, recommend the best place, and the bookings follow with you. Afterwards, each meeting comes with a savings report the client can use in purchasing reviews and Scope 3 reporting.

This article explains why the location question is the gap in most TMC meetings and events services, what pre-trip location advice involves, how it fits into your existing workflow, and how to report its value to corporate clients.

The decision that happens before the booking

TMCs are very good at the "how" of business travel: the right fare, policy compliance, duty of care, consolidated data. For meetings, the "where" is decided earlier and elsewhere. An organiser picks a city in a calendar invitation, perhaps the headquarters, perhaps last year's venue, and from that moment the travel cost and emissions of every attendee are largely fixed. By the time the first booking reaches your agents, there is little left to optimise.

Internal meetings are also hard to see in travel data. Thirty people flying to the same city for a two-day workshop arrive as thirty individual bookings. Unless the client runs it through a meetings and events desk, nobody looks at the trips together and asks whether a different city would have been cheaper, cleaner or less tiring for the group.

That is the opening for a TMC. You already know where your clients' travellers start, which policy applies and which rates are negotiated. Adding advice on where to meet turns that knowledge into a service that sits before the booking, not after it.

What pre-trip location advice involves

Pre-trip location advice compares candidate cities for one meeting and one group of attendees. With the Meeting Place Finder, the input is a list of origins with head counts: a city, postcode or airport per group, without names. Every candidate city is then ranked on three measures:

• Travel cost, from real schedules and fares in global booking systems for flights, and routing services for rail, bus and car. The client's travel policy, travel classes and negotiated rates are applied, so the result reflects what the client would actually pay.

• CO2, calculated with atmosfair data according to the VDR standard, aligned with the GHG Protocol for Scope 3 category 6 (business travel), with the additional warming effect of flights at altitude shown.

• Door-to-door travel time, which is what decides whether attendees arrive ready to work.

Three views show the extremes: maximum productivity, minimum CO2 and lowest ticket cost. The travel details show the trip from every origin, so you can flag an unfair split early. If the meeting date is flexible, up to three dates can be compared, each date as its own calculation. And when the client already has a location in mind, you can analyse that preferred location and compare it with the optimal place; this cost and CO2 analysis is included at no extra cost.

How it fits into your meetings and events workflow

Location advice does not need a new department. It needs a clear trigger and a few minutes of work per meeting. Most TMCs find three entry points:

• Your meetings and events desk. When a client requests support for a meeting, the location analysis becomes the first step of the proposal, before venue sourcing and group bookings.

• The client's own organisers. With the Outlook add-in, employees plan from the meeting request itself. It is free to install from Microsoft AppSource, and the client's IT assigns it to users or groups. Organisers see the recommendation where they already schedule the meeting.

• Your booking platform. Through white label or API, the recommendation appears in your own tools and your own brand.

A typical flow at the meetings desk looks like this:

1. Collect the origins as head counts per office or airport. Your profile data usually covers this.

2. Add the candidate cities: the client's offices, hubs with good connections and any preferred location.

3. Apply the client's travel policy and negotiated rates.

4. Run the ranking, with alternative dates if the timing is open, and pick the view that matches the client's goals.

5. Send the recommendation with the comparison, including the gap between the preferred location and the best-ranked one.

6. Book the trips for the chosen location, and keep the report for the account review.

Advice first, the booking stays with you

Advice on where to meet is not a detour from your core business; it leads into it. The recommendation is based on the same kind of schedules and fares your agents work with, and once the client has chosen a city, the trips still need to be booked under the client's policy. When the advice comes from you, the booking naturally follows with you.

It also changes the conversation with the client. A TMC that only executes bookings competes on transaction fees and service levels. A TMC that helps decide where meetings take place is part of the planning, and earlier in the process. For corporate clients with a central meetings programme, that is a meaningful difference in how your role is perceived.

Reporting the value to corporate clients

Corporate clients judge a TMC partly on what it can show in account reviews. Location advice produces a number per meeting that is easy to explain:

• A savings report for purchasing that shows the travel cost and CO2 saved against the benchmark location.

• Scope 3 data for business travel, ready for the client's sustainability reporting. Our article on Scope 3 category 6 explains how meeting travel fits in.

• Exports as PDF and CSV for your reporting packs.

Lead with the hard savings, as purchasing does. For clients with science-based climate targets, the CO2 side matters too.

For an idea of scale: in our case study with a DAX-listed company, 219 meetings with 5,652 participants avoided about 1,170 t CO2 and saved over EUR 1M in travel spend. That is roughly EUR 188 in travel cost and about 0.207 t CO2 per participant, our estimate from the totals. Results differ by meeting, but the per-participant figure helps clients see why the location question is worth asking.

What it costs per meeting

Each calculation has one price, covering one event on one date and any number of cities; each further date is its own calculation. Participants are priced in bands, like tax brackets: from participant 101, every additional participant costs less. There is no base fee. Our sales team sends you the price for your event.

A TMC that advises on many meetings a year will find a subscription cheaper than single calculations. Talk to us and we work out the right setup for your client base. More on the TMC use case is on our page for travel management companies.

FAQ

Does location advice replace our booking tools?

No. It sits before the booking and answers where the meeting should take place. The trips are then booked as usual, in your tools and under the client's policy.

Which data do we need?

The origins of the attendees as head counts per city, postcode or airport, without names. The client's travel policy, travel classes and negotiated rates make the result more precise.

Can corporate clients use it themselves?

Yes. With the Outlook add-in, organisers plan from the meeting request. You can also offer the recommendation in your own platform through white label or API.

How do clients report the results?

Each calculation produces a savings report for purchasing and CO2 figures per meeting for the client's Scope 3 reporting, exportable as PDF or CSV.

See it with one of your clients' meetings

The clearest test is a real meeting from your client base. Book a demo and we walk through it with you, or request a free trial for a small event of up to 10 attendees and five cities.