Corporate Travel Destinations

When it comes to transportation, there are several ways you can cut costs without giving up too much quality. In fact, if you sell it right, your attendees will never even know the changes were made to save money. For example, many meeting and event options that are eco-friendly also offer significant cost savings, which makes these options even more appealing for corporate planners.

One example is choosing to hold your corporate meeting or event closer to home. This allows you to avoid paying for expensive airfares and allows you to use more cost-effective transportation options, such as train travel and bus charters. Because air travel has a huge environmental impact, it is easy to sell the avoidance of flying to meetings as an eco-friendly measure. This allows your employer or client to benefit from the positive public sentiment green meetings encourage, as well as the cost savings this option allows.

If you cannot avoid flying to your destination, you can still save money by offering only business class or coach seating, or by holding your event near the airport to save on ground transportation. While airport hotels were once considered a less-than-ideal option, many have undergone considerable renovations or have added enticing extras to make these locations far more appealing.

Airport hotels almost always get a bad rap and, other than the convenience and close proximity to the airport, most travelers see little positive about staying in them. This is even truer when it comes to actually holding a conference, convention or corporate meeting in one. Ask most planners and they are sure to say that they and their clients would rather use a downtown property, and don’t even get them started about the noise from the planes flying overhead. However, it turns out that many airport hotels really do not deserve this reputation and recent full-scale renovations have many competing quite successfully with their downtown counterparts.

An excellent example of this is the Hilton Minneapolis/St. Paul Airport Mall of America, located just three miles from the Minneapolis/St. Paul International Airport. This 300-room hotel has 22,000 square feet of space for events, including a 7,500-square-foot ballroom and nine meeting rooms. As an added bonus, the hotel is adjacent to a wildlife refuge, which offers excellent views from many of the rooms and meeting spaces and – perhaps most importantly – makes the entire area a no-fly zone. The wildlife refuge also has a 125-seat auditorium and 8,000 square feet of event space located in its visitor center, increasing the possibilities for planners that opt for this destination.