Meetings and Events Travel

It is the travel half of what the industry calls MICE: meetings, incentives, conferences and exhibitions. The event planner owns the agenda, venue and content; travel management owns how every attendee gets there, where they sleep and how they get home.

In many companies one person tries to do both, and that’s where things slip: a block of rooms released because nobody tracked the cutoff date, or half the team landing at the wrong airport for the shuttle.

Office managers and executive assistants organizing company offsites, HR and people teams running retreats, sales leaders planning kickoffs and incentive trips, and companies sending staff to trade shows at venues such as the Los Angeles Convention Center or the Las Vegas Convention Center.

A useful rule: once eight to ten people are heading to the same place on the same dates, treat it as an event rather than a string of individual bookings.

Event travel works when one person holds the whole picture. These are the steps we follow.

A room block is a set of rooms a hotel holds for your group at an agreed rate. The cutoff date, usually several weeks before arrival, is when unclaimed rooms return to the hotel’s general inventory, and late registrants may pay a higher rate or find nothing left.

Attrition is how far your actual bookings can fall below the block before the company owes the hotel for empty rooms. Both terms are negotiable before signing, and both are where event budgets quietly leak. We read them closely, track pickup against them, and recommend releasing rooms early rather than paying for ones nobody uses.

You don’t need every detail on day one, but these decisions shape everything else.

Event travel rarely fails dramatically; it erodes through small misses that add up.