Meeting planning platform provider Groups360 this week launched GroupSync Planner Plus, a meeting planning and booking solution the company said has a “specialized set of features” that are “designed for corporate teams needing a standardized request and booking process.”The platform appears to be tailored to matrixed organizations that may require multiple approval processes to initiate a meeting, followed by a planning process controlled by policy and cost guardrails configured into the planning and booking workflow. The platform includes a meeting request form and reporting tools for financial accountability. The company said additional features would be available “soon,” including the ability to apply a master service agreement to all request-for-proposal and booking activities and the ability to flag or preference a given company’s pre-negotiated hotel properties, brands or chains.One of the differentiators for Groups360 is the ability to display live, real-time rates and available rooms and meetings at hotels participating in its marketplace. That said, the number of properties is lower at 25,000 globally than in some other comparative meeting planning tools. Groupize—another platform that announced enterprise-level upgrades this week—for example, says it offers more than 250,000 hotels and venues in its global marketplace, but it may not have access to real-time shelves for content availability. That requires key integrations with hotel property management systems and, given the nature of hotel franchise and management models, isn’t necessarily straightforward and requires at minimum a chain-by-chain approach. Even with the smaller marketplace, Groups360’s Planner Plus could offer some advantages. The integrated nature of the content retrieval enables instant booking for small meetings of 10 to 25 sleeping rooms and event space for up to 50 attendees, but that is only for “participating” properties—not everything in the Groups360 marketplace. Instant-book tools include audiovisual requirements, catering and other services without the need to engage in the RFP process. The enterprise tools, with MSAs applied and preferred property lists, won’t necessarily overlap with that instant-book proposition. However, the more sophisticated toolset will support in other ways, allowing enterprise companies to define meeting types and set standards and policies around those types—to manage costs, quality and attendee experience. Once the meeting type standards are applied and requirements for the individual meeting are established, a simplified RFP process tracks and organizes hotel responses into a single dashboard for the organizer to compare and ease decision making.”One of the inherent challenges that Planner Plus solves for company meeting and event planners is organizing and standardizing the disparate processes that companies use to plan and track various types of events,” said Groups360 SVP product Christian Oliver. “We have developed a comprehensive system that allows corporate planners and teams to easily build and track all meeting data, including event criteria, budgets, expenditure and tiered approvals within a single portal that is accessible to all company stakeholders. Since it’s built within GroupSync, it also provides powerful hotel sourcing and booking capabilities that have been proven to save significant time and money—both valuable resources for any size organization.”
