And Omni will be there in a big way, says Tom Faust, vice president, sales, Omni Hotels & Resorts. After the runaway success of the new Omni Nashville, next to the Music City Convention Center, the hotel company hopes to get the same response in Louisville, long home to bourbon and horses, but now a burgeoning art and music scene as well. Omni will build a 600-room convention hotel (while the nearby Kentucky International Convention Center itself undergoes a $180 renovation and expansion) with 73,000 square feet of meeting space, lots of rooftop action (pool, bar, café, fitness center), along with 225 high-end apartments. A distinguishing feature of the property will be a 20,000-square-foot Eataly-type grocery store/dining complex on the ground floor. The Louisville Omni Hotel & Residences (rendering above) will open in May 2018.

Kevin Iwamoto, Lanyon’s vice president, industry strategy, has been around the strategic meetings management block a time or two. So he’s a great source for knowing what helps and what hinders companies on the path to better capturing and managing their spending on meetings and travel—preferably together. Currently he’s on a mission to stop referring to “consolidation” and start advocating “collaboration.” The latter suggests optimizing the way your company works while the former gets people worried they’ll be consolidated out of their jobs. Also at play, he says, is a lack of C-level awareness of the opportunities merging meetings and transient travel represents. How planners can make the case: When you automate the process of creating preferred transient hotel programs and automate the process of meeting registration and sourcing, the by-product is your total meeting and travel spend data. This data reveals your opportunity to negotiate new levels of preferred rates, and that gets C-level attention. Read our Q&A with Lanyon CMO Anthony Miller, too.

Attendees signed on to do their part to join Michelle Guelbart, director, private sector engagement, with ECPAT (End Child Prostitution and Trafficking), in stopping the sex slavery of children. From the main stage, Guelbart reviewed the harrowing statistic that 100,000 American children are victims of sex trafficking. “I thought this was something that only happened in other countries,” she said, which is likely what most Americans believe as well. But as a radio report from the BBC World Service airing July 30 stated, “It’s mainly American children who are being trafficked for sex in their own country.”

Guelbart’s efforts have made the meetings and travel community more aware of their industry’s central role, as hotels are the primary location for this crime against children. As a result, dozens of hotels, hotel companies, and other tourism entities have signed on to ECPAT’s Code of Conduct. The code is a voluntary set of business priniciples (including training employees, putting clauses in supply chain contracts, and more) designed to prevent sex tourism and the sex trafficking of children. And it’s not only lower-end hotels that are used, Guelbart pointed out: “It’s every single brand represented at this conference.”

As a victim told the BBC, “People go through their daily lives and it’s right in their faces. And they don’t see it.” It’s ECPAT’s mission to open our eyes.

By 2020, the Polish air carrier intends to be the hub of “the New Europe”—that is, Eastern and Central Europe, said Dominic Bernardo, sales director, North America, at the 2015 Global Business Travel Association Convention. Emerging from a mandated financial restructuring, LOT has been freed from some related restrictions and now plans to double in size, both in terms of its fleet and its number of passengers—aiming for 10 million passengers per year. “We see a lot of opportunity for consolidating fragmented markets and creating a leading hub for intercontinental flights in this part of Europe,” Bernardo said. In 2016 the carrier will add Tokyo, Bangkok, and Seoul to its long-haul routes, with an additional two routes to be announced soon. LOT will increase to daily service from Warsaw to Chicago and New York, and it is adding more than a dozen European connections. Demonstrating its desire to be on the cutting edge, LOT also announced it is the first airline to accept bitcoin as payment.

Cvent acquired SignUp4 in May, attracted by some things they did very well, says Anil Punyapu, vice president of enterprise sales & partnerships at Cvent, a cloud-based enterprise event management platform. One of those things was its simple interface. That ease of use is informing Cvent’s most recent offering, Cvent Express, designed for a more straightforward category of corporate meeting, one that may not be planned by a professional meeting planner but possibly by an administrative assistant. Cvent Express is intuitive, allowing a registration site to be built in 10 minutes with no training. Cvent Express will be part of an overall meetings “hub” that Cvent users navigate. With options appropriate for every level of meeting, Cvent helps companies get compliance even from occasional planners and increases the amount of meeting data that can be captured and therefore analyzed and leveraged.

Scott Solombrino, president and CEO of the chauffeured transportation network Dav El | Boston Coach, was a visible presence at the 2015 GBTA Convention, making the case for a level playing field in the realm of ground transportation between the ride-hailing services and taxi and chauffeured car companies. Boston Coach has launched an app for booking rides—get the details here. And Solombrino said the company will expand its fleet to have more vehicles available on demand. Dav El also announced a new partnership with German chauffeur company Sixt, whose cars Dav El will use in Germany while Sixt uses Dav El’s cars in the U.S. The Best of Boston destination management company also is part of the Dav El | Boston Coach group. Lisa Censullo, vice president, Best of Boston, said meeting trends in Boston track those nationwide: a real focus on fresh, healthy, farm-to-table F&B options (she’s gotten to know a lot of local farmers), and off-site networking events with a community service element. 

AIG Travel, which provides travel assistance and insurance through its Travel Guard portfolio, has launched a new online tool, Travel Tracer, giving employers a way to track and manage the safety of business travelers, employees, and fixed assets worldwide, said COO Robert Gallagher at the 2015 GBTA Convention. Travel Tracer gives a real-time display of developing situations that may affect traveling employees, including alerts and ongoing intelligence until the situation—whether catastrophic or merely inconvient—is resolved. A unique feature of Travel Tracer is its situation map, with incidents geocoded down to street level. Travel Tracer also includes “daily global flashpoints,” plotted on the situation map, summarizing world events that could escalate, and configurable pre-trip advisories sent directly to travelers.

Dublin is now the seventh-largest European gateway from North America—it’s the “Dub Hub,” said Jeff Wright, director of sales, North America, for Aer Lingus during the 2015 GBTA Convention. For U.S. travelers returning to their home country, going through Dublin and Shannon is an enormous plus, as the travelers are able to clear immigration and customs, allowing them to check their bags straight through from their originating destination in Europe on to their final destination in the U.S. This service began three years ago, but it was just 18 months ago that Aer Lingus won the right to offer the service on all flights through Dublin and Shannon. In other news from Aer Lingus: expanded transatlantic capacity and a complete revamped business class that includes a lie-flat seat and fast track through security. Upon arrival in Dublin, business class guests can visit the Revival Lounge to have a shower and steam their clothes.

At the 2015 GBTA Convention, Air France showed off La Premiere Suite, its gorgeous new first-class experience, available on 19 777-300s. The carrier reduced the number of seats from eight to four, so they are all aisle seats. Each seat fully reclines to a bed more than six feet long, on which the crew installs a mattress before offering you a duvet and pillow. During waking hours, invite a fellow passenger to the companion seat, so you can dine or work together on a large table. A 24-inch TV screen, automatic shades on your four windows, a homey bedside lamp, a full-length closet, and extra storage are other features. The Air France and KLM cultures complement each other, says Astrid Hennekam, vice president of sales, Air France KLM. While Air France is the classy, luxurious sibling, KLM is the cool, hip one. “As a customer, you can have your pick!” she said. Fittingly, KLM has a focus on social media, promising a response to customers’ posted questions or requests within one hour (with a goal of getting it down to 30 minutes). And when the company designed new uniforms this year, it turned the old ones into carpeting for the planes. KLM’s new World Business Class offering, with more space, storage, and seats that lie flat, is available on all 747s (and on all 777-200s by the end of the year).

While only 10 percent of meeting professionals responding to a recent survey said they hold meetings in Africa, more than half expressed interest in doing so in the future. The survey was conducted in April by American Express Global Business Travel, and was presented at the 2015 GBTA Convention by Stephanie Harris, director of marketing for American Express Meetings & Events.

Also evident from the study, she said, is that respondents had a lack of familiarity with West, Central, and East Africa, and that their perceptions of these regions included the danger of disease and violence, difficulty making payments and getting visas, and a lack of technology and meetings infrastructure. (Pictured is a meeting room at the Four Points Sheraton in Lagos, Nigeria.)

The report concludes, “While Africa continues to face challenges, the economic growth and expansion of many global and multinational companies are increasingly driving meetings and events to the continuent. Meetings suppliers…have an opportunity to work together to clairfy misperceptions and highlight that which makes Africa a strong destination for meetings and events.” Access the study here.