Navigant Plants Mtgs. Flag'C

Navigant International, the fast-growing U.S. Office Products travel agency spin-off, is forming a branded meetings and incentives division that will consolidate the group operations of its 11 member agencies and develop a standardized meetings technology platform for them to share.

The agencies should adopt the Navigant Meetings and Incentives brand by the end of the second quarter, said Carole Perfetti, who will serve as NMI's vice president and general manager.

"Each Navigant agency, in and of ourselves, has a limited amount of services that we provide to the meetings and incentives market. But together we can provide a true end-to-end product," Perfetti said. "One of the agencies may concentrate on association meetings, another may have Web registration, for example. Together and collectively, we can provide the whole meetings and incentives product to a customer seamlessly under the NMI name."

NMI will share technological capabilities—as, for example, the Web registration technology of NMI member Omni Travel of Cambridge, Mass., —and marketing materials throughout its agency network. "We'll have the ability to tap into someone else's expertise in what might be their low season when it's the other's high season," Perfetti said, though she noted the collaboration would be transparent to the corporate customer. "We wouldn't refer a client to another NMI agency. The client's primary agency would still serve as the primary contact, but behind the scenes their needs could be fulfilled with the assistance of another agency."

Like Navigant, which in less than two years has grown through acquisitions into one of the largest U.S. agencies, NMI will look to quickly expand its network. "Our plan is to grow in several ways, through Navigant's commercial accounts where we don't have their meetings and incentives business, but also through new business and acquisitions," Perfetti said. "We'll be targeting some meeting and incentive companies to add to the NMI mix, to help us grow the way we have been growing on the other side."

Navigant also is planning to standardize its approach to meetings technology. "Rather than have everybody do this independently, we have formed a committee that will review all software and determine what will best serve all our needs in the future," Perfetti said. "My guess is, it will be a combination of some existing meeting-planning software and our own, but it's premature to speculate. We need to do an analysis of our needs and how to serve them best."

Navigant expects that cross-selling transient and group travel services will allow it to get its thumb into a bigger slice of the corporate-business pie. "We looked at who our big customers are on the corporate side, and we looked to see if Navigant also had their meetings and incentives business, and that's not always the case," Perfetti said. "By the same token, we're in a lot of big doors on the meetings side that Navigant on the corporate side could be in if we were able to share information. It brings Navigant as a whole into a lot more companies to provide a lot more services."

NMI will offer its services first to Navigant's existing corporate client base, but "we're not turning anybody away," Perfetti said.

The NMI concept was born in 1998, at a meeting between Gina Keating, president of Englewood, Colo.-based Professional Travel Corp., and Robert Dunlop, president of Mutual Travel Inc. of Seattle. They tapped Perfetti, along with Mutual's director of meetings and incentives Scott Uselding and Omni chief administrative officer Eileen Wingate, to explore the existing meetings and incentives business of Navigant's agencies and to identify "common strengths and challenges."

"Within these 11 locations, we all have specialties to some degree," Perfetti said. "There's no central office or headquarters yet, but the wheels are in motion, and things are beginning to happen. The pieces are being put together and the Website is being designed."

Perfetti was president and CEO of Minneapolis-based World Travel and Incentives when it was acquired by Professional Travel in 1997. Later that year, Professional was acquired by U.S. Office Products, which last year spun off its travel operations under the Navigant name.

Perfetti wouldn't say how much Navigant has budgeted for getting NMI off the ground because "we haven't added staff yet and we're still brainstorming. But the fact that we have 11 organizations bearing the financial burden will help us get there a lot faster."