Connecting a Global Industry, One Event at a Time
The Business Travel Association (BTA) represents the business travel industry, working to raise their profile in the broader economy. From airlines and hotels to rail operators, construction companies, and even academic institutions, the BTA ensures travel for work happens smoothly and efficiently. Last year alone, their members facilitated 6.4 million journeys and 32 million transactions, covering 90% of business travel spend in the UK.
For the BTA’s small events team, managing a large portfolio of global events is no small feat. From debates and educational sessions to sector-specific conferences and flagship international events, the team ensures face-to-face meetings drive economic value, build relationships, and support industry collaboration.
“With 15–20 face-to-face sessions a year, plus webinars and podcasts across multiple regions, our events are critical to keeping the business travel community connected,” explains Andrew Clarke, Commercial Director at The BTA. “But with a small team, we needed a way to manage all this efficiently - without losing the quality of experience for our attendees.”
The Challenge: Disconnected Processes and Manual Work
Before Cvent, the BTA’s event operations were fragmented, with 3 key challenges:
- Communication: With different sources, messaging was not consistent. The flow of communication and the schedule differed between events, lacking tone-of-voice consistency.
- Registration: This was a challenge for both attendees and the internal team, with unclear data capture and no clear flow for attendees.
- Reporting: The team lacked pre- and post-event data clarity, with no way of tracking engagement or optimising attendee journeys.
“Before Cvent, we didn’t have calendar integration or a central platform for registration,” says Andrew. “We had to pull lists manually, send multiple communications, and there was no way to easily see how registrations were flowing or measure engagement after events.”
From the word go, we felt as though we were the most important client
Cvent Working as an Invisible Team Member
With 3 key challenges identified, the team at BTA needed a solution that would do the heavy lifting in the background, freeing up time allowing the team to be more strategic and stay in-the-moment.
Andrew explains how Cvent addressed the challenges:
- Consistent communication at scale: Email templates and scheduling tools allowed the BTA to rinse and repeat emails, ensuring consistent messaging.
- Streamlined registration: Emails can come direct from registration, eliminating manual data transfer workflows. This could feed easily into the retention campaign, pushing attendees to key actions – like downloading the app.
- Real-time reporting: The team had instant data within the platform. “We got some amazing statistics back from the event”, Andrew tells us.
Cvent supported with a post-event review, giving The BTA a clear overview of their Munich Event.
Prior to using Cvent, our average app download rate was 58%. With Cvent, it went up to 96%. Our attendees were a lot more informed.
Early Results
In the first few months of using Cvent, The BTA have already seen measurable impact.
? 20 annual events
? International attendees
? Increased app adoption – from 58% to 96%
? Centralised reporting
From the word go, we felt as though we were the most important client
With more events still to migrate onto Cvent in the next 6 months, The BTA will have a wealth of consolidated knowledge at their fingertips, that can be fed back into their events strategy.
“[Cvent] will give us such an in-depth database of how we’re performing, who our top attendees are, how we engage with our community,” Andrew tells us, “That’s something we have never had as an organisation”.
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