Welcome to Travel Again presents the weekly travel Roundup, covering the headwinds and tailwinds impacting the business of travel. Please welcome our hosts, Mike McCormick and Ed Silver. Hello Mike. Welcome to the show. Wow, it’s season three as you know, but holy mackerel, we are at episode three already. This season is just on fire. I almost said in fuego, but I don’t think I can pull that off. Well, we’re moving. Yeah. And boy, I’ll tell you, not just today’s show, but the lineup ahead is also looking really good. We should have some really exciting stuff coming in the coming weeks. We’ll have a very busy spring and that’s the way we like it.
All right Mike, unless there’s any objections from the studio audience, I am going to bust right into the news today. Are you ready? I’m ready. Ready if you are. All right. I chose a variety of news articles today. Some of them tie together and some of them don’t, but I found them all interesting. The first article is from our friends at Focuswire. Online travel giants spend 17.8 billion on marketing in 2024. Holy mackerel, Mike. Full year 2024 financial reports of the online giants Airbnb, Booking Holdings, Expedia Group, and Trip.com reveal the investment of 17.8 billion total, up from a cool billion from 2023’s figure. That’s just an enormous growth. What is going on with online spending here, Mike?
Well, I think first off, you just have to step back and look at how the industry is constructed, particularly in this area for the OTAs, and how they acquire customers and how it works. Look, they’re spending that amount of money. They’re dominating the spend with all the usual places to go acquire customers. The downside is it makes it very difficult for new entrants or smaller players to compete because they bid up effectively, bid up the primary areas where keywords, etc., where you go and acquire customers. It works when you’re working at that scale. It’s a huge scale game when it comes to marketing. But it doesn’t work well in terms of… you kind of have in that space, you either have one of the big players or you’re really creatively finding pockets or areas where you can go get customers at a reasonable cost of acquisition around the edges.
And that’s effectively the industry. Now it doesn’t surprise me that they continue to spend more and more and more because effectively they’re competing against the brands themselves and that is it. I mean, that defines the marketplace. For that to change in any meaningful way, one of two things has to happen. Either the new ways of acquiring customers come along, like new basically new search options, and that’s where AI fits in and where the game could change. So fundamental changes could be coming in. I think that’s what everybody is effectively hoping for, that in this new world it maybe levels the playing field a bit, makes it more possible for smaller new entrants, smaller brands to be able to break in. Even for the brands themselves, if you’re like a smaller hotel group or something, how do you effectively acquire customers when again you’re competing against the likes of billion, multi-billion dollar spenders? It’s just a different game.
There hasn’t been any significant change in this in years now. I mean, this has been the… since I don’t know, maybe the last certainly 15 years, this is the way the game is played. This is a big jump in spending. AI is discussed in the article, so I encourage our listeners to go read the full article. There is some efficiency to be gained from AI. Talking about smaller competitors being able to… I mean AI is democratizing the amount and the efficiency for marketing, we hope. But only the big players can spend at that level. So, as always, an interesting one to watch.
Okay Mike, on to the next article. Expedia Group and Southwest Airlines announce a partnership in a travel industry first. Expedia Group will now offer Southwest Airlines flights covering the airline’s entire network of 117 destinations in 11 countries including the US, Mexico, Caribbean, allowing customers more booking opportunities. What a turnaround for Southwest who has never been anywhere from online to GDS and now slowly but surely distribution is everywhere.
Well, again, one of those where it helps when you have the context of history why something like this is actually meaningful, a real landmark change. It might be one of those that it probably would have been more significant if this was 10 years ago, not now. At this point it’s almost kind of like a foregone conclusion in a sense that they wouldn’t do that, especially given Southwest’s woes and board battles and all the issues with trying to drive better financials. It makes sense for them to do a deal likely on good terms for them in terms of any distribution cost that they’re incurring here. But the realities are they’ve always been very late to the game.
If you understand the history of the industry and history of Southwest, they were the original “we sell directly” model. It was the bane of the corporate travel existence for years. Southwest originally basically had a leisure route network. Their whole business was being the anti-major carrier player. Simple, we have peanuts and a drink, we have a good experience, we get from point A to point B. Simple. It’s kind of the original no-frills here in the States, but one that actually they were on time, they did provide a good service. They were the alternate and people loved them. The people that were regular flyers loved them.
As they expanded their route network, as they expanded what they did, they eventually had to go into the GDS because it was important for corporate travel; that’s where everything lives. You need to be able to book there, at least be able to book and then capture the information necessary from the booking. Now, fast forward to working in the OTA world. Again, long time coming, not a surprise given the last year, year and a half of Southwest’s existence and how they’ve kind of had to devote themselves to making some changes in terms of the product they’re offering and now the way they distribute. So, not a shocker at this stage, but it is still kind of a landmark change for the industry insider folks who’ve been around this for a long time. Oh wow, we’ve really come full circle here.
Certainly struck me that way. Thanks for that context. On to article three for today. Mike, my favorite topic that I love to talk about which is action in the space. 17 travel tech acquisitions so far this year as reported by our friends at Skift. That’s 17 acquisitions. Now, a lot of these are small deals in the M&A space, but there are some trends coming out. These small deals are leading unprecedented M&A activity in travel tech right now and you’ll see that they dominate the list if you read the full article. These firms have accumulated approximately three trillion that they need to deploy and roughly 300 billion of that is earmarked for tech.
One area where larger deals are emerging is in the travel payment space. As you go through this article, Mike, it’s clear that there are quite a few of these deals that were done in that travel payment space, some of which are actually fairly large. We have names like Shift4 spending 2.5 billion to acquire Global Blue. You have Flywire acquiring Sertifi for 330 million. HomeToGo is acquiring Interhome. TravelPerk buys the startup Yokoy. There’s a little bit of a trend there, but just a lot of action. And it’s only March. Actually surprised it’s March. It’s March 4th as we record today and more deals I’m sure are on the way. Mike, a little context for our listeners, please.
Well, a couple things. One is even for us as Travel Again Advisory, we’ve been getting more and more involved in M&A activity as part of our practice. We see a little microcosm of the bigger industry in terms of the type of work we do and see. It’s not surprising, this article, given a lot of our more recent activity in our business. Secondly, I always think about this, we talk about the space and M&A activity a lot as we watch these trends. There always seems to be two areas in travel that if you’re looking for where the M&A activity is, there’s two things you can count on.
One is smaller, earlier entry travel technology businesses where someone has a great idea and develops some sort of innovation. But scaling it in the travel space is very difficult, often very expensive, and to go it… you need to raise a lot of money to do that no matter what part of the travel sector you’re going after. In order to do that, you kind of have one of two paths. It’s either that or you sell to an established player who’s looking to add that innovation and can’t necessarily drive that innovation internally within their own company. So, they go and acquire and that’s natural.
The other area that’s always M&A activity, not on this list because it’s not in the travel tech category, but it’s the never-ending roll-up acquisition in the travel agency space. Probably one of the things you can always count on from now until the end of time: if you go and start a travel agency, build up a little book of business, there’s somebody out there that will buy you. I can almost guarantee that that will happen at a reasonable multiple. And everybody wins. But the bigger players in the TMC space, for example, are always looking for business, some of it organically, but when they see an opportunity to acquire and roll up a similar business at the right price, that’s always another M&A area.
In this case, again, no doubt that’s happening. Payment is not a big surprise because it’s kind of like one of those, not last frontier, but maybe next frontier of areas where there’s clearly money to be made and innovation that’s needed in terms of payment security, etc. So here we are again, no shockers, but it should be a good year for M&A I think, despite kind of the political uncertainties and all the things happening. When you kind of step aside from that and just look at the business and look at the next 12 to 18 months, the environment certainly seems right for M&A.
There are some companies on this list that were just as acquisitive last year as it looks like they’re going to be this year. Juniper Group continues their surge; they added another travel tech company. Mews completes its, I think it’s its 12th acquisition in succession. There are some companies on here that are very acquisitive, ones to watch out for because they’re clearly on the hunt for good travel tech.
Okay, thanks for that, Mike. All right, the last article is as always a bit self-serving, but I cannot help myself. Mike, Travel Again Advisory and Phocuswright enter into a strategic partnership. What is going on here, Mike? Well, you know what’s going on, Ed. But I mean, we’re really excited about this. Obviously, it’s kind of like going home for us. Certainly my past… at one point I was Chief Operating Officer of Phocuswright back a few years ago, but had the honor of working with the late Philip Wolf, who was a great partner, friend, and mentor of mine. Coming back around to partner with Phocuswright now for our business again is a really nice feeling. And then for our customers, it’s terrific.
You can comment a bit on that from your own perspective, but taking all of their truly best-in-class research and content and expertise and bringing that together with us and what we do, and putting that all together in a combined offering, I think is really powerful. Yeah, obviously I agree on this one, Mike. I think it’s fantastic for both firms and for our clients who love to see our advice and recommendations be database, be result-oriented, be researched down to the wire. Phocuswright is the preeminent research group within the travel sector and so thrilled to have them as a partner on this journey.
I’ll make a comment, go so far to say it’s like all the capabilities, AI, and everything’s great, but if you’re basically just taking tools and putting them over the top of weak data, faulty data… garbage in, garbage out. The thing that you’re getting with our combined efforts is you’re getting truly terrific research that’s fundamentally sound and really great stuff combined with our expertise and the tools of the day. I think we’ve got a really terrific offering that our clients will be happy with.
Thank you for indulging me in that one. And Mike, it is now time for our guest. I’m just really excited to bring our guest on. Today, we will be interviewing Ciaran Delaney. Ciaran has over 25 years experience in leadership roles in the travel and technology space. He is currently the founder and CEO of Hubli. He has worked in five countries covering destination, hotel, TMC, and online bookings. And as the founder of Hubli, he is the global leader in simple meetings technology. Mike, please welcome to the stage Ciaran Delaney.
Ciaran, nice to see you. Hi guys, great to join you today. Good, glad to have you aboard. And as a fellow Irishman, we should have done this at a pub somewhere. That would have been… you’re in Dublin, Ciaran, right? Yes indeed. We have offices in New York and in Dublin in Ireland. So this week I’m in Dublin, so plenty of pubs nearby, Mike, that I can go in later on. But you’ve since moved to New York more recently? Yeah, exactly. Probably two years ago, I moved to New York because we’re seeing a lot of growth in the US market. So, we’ve expanded the team and I’m over there full-time now. That’s great.
Good place to be certainly for business, I’m sure, as you’ve… again, I know the big focus has been expanding here in the US and nothing helps the cause more than being on the ground here to help do it and drive your success. Going back, originally you founded Meetingsbooker in 2009 and then Hubli in 2021 and kind of gone from there. When you look back, stepping back from it, what are some of the more notable changes you’ve seen in the meetings market over that time? And then I guess, what’s stayed the same? Everybody focuses on change but certainly in travel the song remains the same often. What are maybe some observations for us?
I think what’s changed has been… the two biggest changes have just been digitalization. When you look at today, I think it’s 87% of large corporates have a digitalization strategy in place or are about to put one in place. So, we’re in a much more digital world and that’s a big focus for large corporates, large spenders in business travel and meetings. We’re seeing more and more big corporates go to market looking for technologies to self-serve meeting reservations and to have less of a manual approach.
The second big change is just how we work. The vast majority of people today work regularly from home and that’s really impacted business travel. According to the GBTA, nearly 70% of business travel is for meetings. 20% is for internal meetings. Those two changes have really stimulated everybody in the market to look at technologies, from the large corporates who are going to tender now—and we’re getting a lot of new big corporate clients that are changing how they service meetings—but also the hotel groups are all looking at technology, the TMCs, the whole market really. So I think they’re the two biggest macro changes. What stayed the same? I think the need. In meetings, there was a period where people thought everything was going to go virtual, but you can’t beat that, you can’t be in person to sell products, to innovate, and that hasn’t changed.
That’s a good one. I remember going into… this is a long time ago, but when Oracle first came out with some of the virtual meeting rooms, it was really expensive. I remember AMX had piloted one and you went in and they were having a meeting with somebody and you had all the visual impact. It’s not much different than what we’re experiencing right now. But it was like, “Oh my gosh, this is going to change the world” and everybody’s like, “This will be the end of travel, the end of meetings.” And it was like, “Yeah, okay.” What we saw, and I remember this during our GBTA days, there was still that same rhetoric. Meanwhile, travel is growing at the same pace as these tools are developing. It’s like no, because the people need the human contact. This is more of a companion tool. It’s like I’m doing this instead of a phone call, but it’s not replacing my need to get there. Now, post-pandemic, I would think companies would be much more hyper-focused on managing their meetings better because now, to your point, it’s really flip-flopped and it’s become even more critical than your traditional transient travel. Do you see that kind of focus now? Is there at least like you’ve got people’s attention more than ever?
When you think about it today in meetings, people are coming together to collaborate and innovate in person, and to learn and to sell products. Those three things—innovation, collaboration, and sales—are what drives success in large organizations. If you’re not good at those three things, you don’t survive. Business has gotten so much faster now that the larger corporates realize they need to make it easy and quick for employees to come together in a sustainable way. And obviously that’s financially smart; they can save money as well. But the speed is a huge factor. We have one client that saved nine hours per booking by using Hubli versus a manual servicing. That’s over a day of time that people are now saving. That organization is a massive company. They have a big advantage. They can bring their people together to collaborate and sell their products faster than the competitors. That’s a nice macro advantage to have.
Coming back to your business today, what are your primary areas that you’re focused on in terms of how you want to innovate, where you’re investing? When you’re looking at the horizon, where are you spending your money and time?
With us, it’s kind of… we’re always building new technology. There’s kind of like the first half of this year, there’s a focus and then the second half there’s another focus. In the first half, a big focus is on integrations with the larger hotel groups and venue providers. We’re seeing there’s a big appetite from the hotels and venues to have a deeper integration with Hubli because we have a lot of big corporate clients and a lot of great TMC partners. Again, they want digitalization as well; they want more of a faster solution and less time involved for their teams. Integrations with the bigger hotel groups… we’re going to increase our supply base by nearly 50% this year through a lot of big integrations with big players in the market.
The second piece is distribution. We have a partnership at Amex GBT and a partnership at FCM where we power a white-label booking solution for both of those guys. Also, in December we launched a partnership with Amadeus with Cytric Easy, whereby you’ll be able to book your flights and your transient travel in Cytric Easy and also book meetings and group accommodation powered by Hubli. That’s a huge shift in the market. It’s where you’re combining transient and meetings. Obviously for us it’s a massive distribution opportunity. So the first half of the year, they’re the kind of key areas we’re focused on. The second half it’s payments and AI, which I know we’re going to be talking about. But yeah, that’s the focus at the moment.
I’ll switch gears a little bit and I’ll say this first part very diplomatically. The current US political forces have de-emphasized sustainability. Give us more of a global view. When you talk to your customers, when you talk to the venues, everyone that you’re connecting in your ecosystem, where does sustainability stand now versus maybe it was pre-pandemic looking forward? Is it still a high area of importance for your customers and for the suppliers? Where does that sit today?
We’re very global. We have a lot of major Fortune 500 clients who book all over the world. Last year we had bookings in nearly 100 countries. It is a very global platform and obviously sustainability is a big factor on people’s agenda. It does vary depending on the organization and also the maturity of their program. Some kind of obviously get the initial technology in place. For us, our goal with sustainability has always been to sort of help the user make sustainable choices when they’re booking. Have it in the booking environment in the booking flow.
We built a technology called Where to Meet which allows you to decide what destination you should use for your meeting based on the carbon emissions to travel there. That’s very popular and that’s in the planning phase. You can kind of pick a city based on emissions and reducing that footprint. Then also we have a partnership to present sustainability accreditation for venues. Finally, you can also remove high-waste items from the meetings themselves like single-use plastics on the platform. It’s very much an end-to-end solution: planning, venue, day of the meeting, to track and reduce emissions and wastage throughout the journey. It’s still a key factor for a lot of our clients and as I said, obviously sometimes it’s something they want to focus on in a phase two because they want to get up and running with initial technology first and then keep refining. That’s one of the areas of refinement.
Yeah, we kind of coin it the “waste not, want not” kind of area. There are so many areas where with some of those smart prompting awareness as you’re going through the process, you can be smart and do things that are less waste. Just the obvious things that you can do. If you request them, everybody’s there to support it, pretty much.
We’ll switch gears to AI, which is in your second half of the year category, but it’s certainly on everybody’s list. Big picture, where do you see the big opportunities where AI meets meetings? Where do you see the biggest opportunities and maybe the ones that you see right on the horizon coming up?
Listen, it’s going to transform everything. Not just travel and meetings, but every way we work. I think the big advantage is… I suppose if you’re a technology company that has a lot of data and you’re sort of controlling and getting a lot of unique data and then you also have the ability to build technology in a smart way, that’s the perfect combination. That’s sort of where we sit. We’ve kind of built our booking environment from the ground up, so we have a lot of data points we can interact with and use AI to optimize.
It’s going to transform the whole experience for the user. I think that the search environment will change. When you search on all platforms whether it’s Booking.com, Airbnb, Hubli for meetings and group hotels, I think the experience is going to change in the coming years. It won’t happen… it’ll take a bit of time, but that search and book experience is going to change dramatically. Pricing is going to be very different. I think the supply base are going to leverage AI. We did an integration last year with Radisson whereby we’re connecting into their meetings and events technology and that’s an AI platform. They’re already using AI to help with their pricing and streamline the process for quoting for bigger meetings and we’re connecting into those solutions.
The final area is the customer service. That’s a big cost for hotels and TMCs. For us to a lesser extent because we’re very technology-first. But I think the customer service from the point of view of contracting, giving support both to the venues and to the user, is moving through AI rapidly. That’s probably the area that’s going to move the fastest through AI.
We had Terry Jones on and one of his quotes was about… which really for me crystallized… AI gives the ability to really better understand customer intent and that’s gold. To your point, I think during that whole planning effort, if you can really better understand the intent behind the meeting and what they’re trying to accomplish and you get that nuance, it helps you really serve up better options, helps the supplier be more responsive. It probably could cut out a lot of the… create a lot of efficiencies in that exchange rather than the back and forth that goes through when you’re planning something. Tell me more about what you want to do, what you want to accomplish, what you envision the outcome, and then let the tools and you take over and really help serve up some really interesting options that they may not even have considered before. That’s when I get excited, that’s when I go like, okay, it’s not all the negative parts of the massive investment, no, just that’s where you really see something good for the customer. Not how you’re going to squeeze more dollars out of the transaction… it’s like no, that the customer actually has a better experience. But do you have customers asking for it at this stage?
I think quite a few. Some larger corporates don’t want AI. They’re cautious about AI accessing their information. You have a cohort who are cautious about AI from our client-based perspective and others who are already using it in other areas whether it’s flight booking or transient booking and they’re keen to sort of… they see the benefits of it. It’s kind of probably a little bit split but in fairness we’re already… we use quite a bit of machine learning anyway. As I said we have a lot of data points. If someone gives a budget for their booking, we kind of can help to distill the venues already based on previous pricing data points. When you have the data, that’s the key thing and then building the AI around it obviously has its challenges. I think the interest has grown this year. I’ve seen we’ve won a lot of big corporate clients this year who’ve gone to tender for technology and it’s coming up more and more that they want to see your vision for AI.
I’m going to switch to a different topic altogether, another area that I think to me really… meetings really lag behind the rest of the industry and that’s payments. It’s still… my historical take is that man, it was this is an area where it was still being done literally painfully manually and very fragmented. No click and easy way that you’re doing a payment back to multiple vendors for a meeting. It was always kind of the little bit of the bane of the existence of the meeting afterwards. Where are we in payments in this world for meetings?
You’re spot on, actually. You’re spot on. Last year we ran Hubli Labs which was a series of kind of innovation think tanks with corporate buyers. We had four events with 50 buyers who attended and they represented a lot of big corporations—a lot of the bigger life sciences tech firms attended—and one of the goals was to figure out what are their top three pain points and payment and expense were first and second. Third we’re saying and third one two three four five. Well, contracting is a big pain point but we’ve already solved that. We have a platform where you can embed your contract into the platform.
We’re actually launching a new payment system next month which is an integration with Conferma, which will allow for corporate clients to pay for the meeting based on the predetermined schedule for payments which is going to be in the platform. It could be 50% prior, 50% after. The hotel or venue will get a virtual card and be able to get faster payment. That’s something we’re seeing as well: hotels and venues need to get… they want to get paid as quickly and promptly as possible. So, that new solution really tackles that pain point of being able to just agree a schedule of payment and have an automated solution that delivers that to the venue while you still have visibility and control. Then also post-meeting have the final kind of reconciliation looped in as well, which we already have actually. Excited to bring that to market and it is a big pain point for sure.
For the venue or for the hotel, cash flow and payment is a huge issue. Especially when they have to… by the time they’re able to reconcile what the final bill cost is, get that confirmed and then see payment, months are going by. Even properties… you say oh they’re part of a big brand, but that doesn’t mean that’s where the ownership is and that’s where the cash flow matters. Cash flow and payments are a huge issue and an opportunity. They’ll gladly participate in any way that they can speed up the payment process. And then on the company side too, just reconciling, getting it done, assurance that they see the meeting costs are within compliance. We’ll be looking forward to seeing your release and what that does.
This is just general last one. If you’re for certainly for your clients and prospective clients, what advice would you give them in terms of areas to focus on today in terms of optimizing the value of a meeting, the outcomes in a meeting? If you had to boil it down to one or two things, what would those be?
In general, we’re seeing a lot more kind of larger corporations take a very innovative approach and look for new technologies. More and more larger corporations are using our technology, and sharing their experience with others as well. If you’re a travel manager or a meetings manager in a large corporation and you want to innovate your meetings program, the key thing is probably just to take it in small steps. Number one, don’t try and do too much change too soon and also bring the internal stakeholders along with you and keep that dialogue with the key stakeholders internally.
That’s always something we recommend when we’re talking to new clients. The other thing is just talking to peers. One of the reasons why we did Hubli Labs was to get… allowed the buyers to come together and swap success stories and maybe things that didn’t work and sort of share their best practice. We also really try and work with our clients to do case studies. Actually on hubli.com you can see a case study with BP who use us and they’ve saved over 18% in their expenditure. ASML, who in their first two years had 10,000 meetings through Hubli and saved nine hours per booking. That’s a lot of time saved. We actually launched a new case study with Autodesk who have saved 77% using internal meetings. The more people share their journey with others, it helps the newer people coming along looking to innovate to have some reference points to support their program internally in their organization.
We’ll do our season 3 wrap-up question with you now. We’re all faced with real and perceived chaos in our personal and professional lives. How do you cope with the chaos in your life?
Listen, when you’re a founder of a company, there’s more chaos than anything else and more challenges hitting you because you’re building something new. Building something new takes that learning experience and adjusting and there’s a lot of chaos and challenges. I’m kind of lucky, I think, that I tend to be quite calm in chaos and also quite decisive. I think they’re two good attributes: you just have to be calm, look at your options, and make a decision and kind of stick with it. In general, I think whether you’re a founder or you’re working in a company and you’ve got a busy, demanding role, I think just having balance is good. Being able to get out for a game of golf every odd weekend and spend time with your family and travel. Having a good work-life balance is pretty important to de-stress and to help you manage those challenges that always come along. This too shall pass, as they say.
Give a little bit of perspective always helps. Thank you for coming. Thank you for being on today and being our special guest. Ciaran Delaney is founder and CEO of Hubli. Ciaran, it was wonderful to have you on the show. Thank you for your time. Thanks guys. Appreciate it. Cheers.
All right Mike. Mike, we’re gonna try something new today for our listeners. We’re gonna do a post-game analysis and I am going to bring on our head of meetings and events who knows way more about this area than I do or you do. Maybe combined. Let’s bring her on the stage. Please welcome Linda McNary. Linda, welcome to the show.
Hello, Linda. I know you’ve been listening. Relax, you can relax. I know you’ve been listening in the background. Give us your post-game analysis. What struck you the most about the interview today? What was your biggest takeaway?
A lot of things, a lot of great points were made, good questions asked, and great responses given. The first thing that struck me—and in the spirit of full disclosure, I’ve known Ciaran for a long time. I followed Meetingsbooker and then the change to Hubli. Again full disclosure, when I was leading technology at American Express Meetings & Events and we were launching our white-label solution, Meetingsbooker at the time was selected as one of our partners for that. Listening to Ciaran today reinforced that a good decision was made way back then.
By that I mean I think there’s a unique ability for a CEO or the founder of a startup company to be able to understand and read the trends in the industry and understand what’s happening. I love the question around what’s changed and what stayed the same. I couldn’t agree with him more that digitalization and the change in the workforce and how we work has massively transformed our industry and what meetings and events look like. But at the same time, the answer that people need to meet… we talked about that in season one, the need to get together to collaborate, to solve problems, to advance business objectives is still very much there.
The ability to understand the marketplace that you’re in and see around the next corner… highlighting what Hubli has done in terms of sustainability. It’s not just… I think unfortunately some of the loss of luster around sustainability efforts has happened because people were doing things just to check the box and weren’t making sustainable changes to impact sustainability. But when you listen to what Hubli has done, it’s a very thoughtful application of sustainability from making the decision of where to hold your meeting all the way through the execution of the meeting and the ability to remove onsite waste such as plastic water bottles. Which is a lot more thoughtful than saying, “We’ve got a sustainability program,” that takes 30 seconds to read and doesn’t really have a long-term impact.
What was your biggest takeaway, Mike? Well, I think some of it was just that the industry has come a long way. Back to your point, Linda, those early days of white labeling, as innovative as it was at the time to even have any tools… forget any digitization because meetings were basically still being done largely with paper and emails and just rudimentary planning efforts based on somebody who had the experience of doing it in a company and they owned it. It almost wasn’t a part of travel. It was just kind of this own thing over here. To see it go from that to where… the meeting practitioners, there was like it was almost kind of a closed group that focused on it. It had its own designations, its own everything, its own acronyms. It always seemed puzzling to me. I was like, why?
Now we’re at a point where it feels much more integrated, more mainstream. I think one of those consequences of the pandemic, just for what it is. I think it changed travel patterns. Now meetings… and it’s the lines are blurred in a good way. Now it’s like the tools are being adapted. The things they’re talking about doing like focusing on the payments, etc. We’re finally there where a lot has been done in the transient travel part of it and now this is catching up. I think some of the intent thing, things where you can really get to the heart of why you are having that meeting, what do you want to accomplish. We talked a lot in your interview about things where you are rising up that hierarchy where you’re thinking things like, “Hey, I want to be a producer of content at my meeting.” You can’t do those things if you’re still writing out checks for payment. There’s no time. That’s what that does too: it allows people to really be a lot more strategic about how they’re approaching meetings in general. That’s exciting for the sector.
Couldn’t agree more. Thank you for that post-game analysis. I must admit I am amazed how big that marketplace is. It is incredible to see them growing at the pace they’re growing and the names of the companies he was using. Really incredible. Great to see Hubli doing that.
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