HRS rolls out ‘meetings-as-a-service’ tool

Accommodation and payment technology company HRS has launched a new tool to streamline the management of simple meetings.

Labelled HRS Connect, the new platform is billed as offering ‘meetings-as-a-service’ by combining venue search and booking capabilities with online payment and expense management tools.

The platform is now live and uses AI and automation to provide ‘instant’ pricing. The company said its “new instant-pricing technology leverages pricing history and preferred supplier agreements to significantly reduce the time it takes to consider rate options and lock in the right combination of meeting space and room nights”.

It also features digitised invoice reconciliation and payments and provides planners with a ‘real-time’ overview of meetings spend. The company’s sustainability-focused Green Stay initiative is also built into the venue search functionality.

Jason Long, SVP of global business development at HRS Group, said the tool has been specifically designed for self-service use by corporate meeting planners or EAs and doesn’t require any training.

Speaking to BTN Europe at the GBTA Europe conference in Copenhagen this week, Long said the platform provides “an entry point” for meeting planners to access HRS’ existing travel procurement, booking and invoicing tools to align meetings management more closely to the level of maturity seen in managed corporate travel programmes.

HRS this year has been steadily expanding its travel management capabilities and its foray into meetings follows the October launch of a new workplace travel tool to manage project-based teams as well as its recently expanded partnership with Concur Travel.  

In line with this, Long said HRS has created an entirely new business unit dedicated to meetings. The company’s Workforce and Meetings Solutions division is led by Luca De Angelis, who said recent trials of the meetings-as-a-service solution among clients have resulted in cumulative cost savings of 28 per cent.

“Our existing clients are lined up to deploy this solution, and engagement from trendsetting verticals like automative, consulting and pharmaceutical/life sciences is growing by the week. It’s the right time for this solution, as this segment requires the benefits of new automation as simple meeting volume grows across the globe.”

While the tool is targeted to ‘self-serving’ corporate planners, Long said some clients are also pushing the tool to their travel/meetings management agency and “we’re happy for that to happen,” he said.