Tailor-made for WTM Latin America, the platform provides intelligent features that help with the pre-event planning and promote more assertive meetings

Promoting professional meetings with the potential to generate business is WTM Latin America’s core business. In order to achieve this primary objective, year after year, the organisation invests in tools that optimise the journey of all the players involved. “We adhere to the concept of intelligent events, which meet the needs of exhibitors and visitors and help them get the very most out of the experience via the use of technology before, during and after the event,” sums up WTM Latin America’s Marketing and Communication Manager, Thais Del Ben.

For the 2023 edition, WTM Latin America is enhancing an important differential for travel professionals to plan their participation. The differential in question is ConnectMe, a platform that is dedicated to scheduling meetings that was customised in order to enable participants to schedule their appointments even before the first day of the event. This tool allows the professionals to get to know each other in advance and with each passing edition is being enhanced so as to offer more features. “Professionals can create an individual profile along with a profile for their company, including any interests in certain products and services, and the system will cross-reference the data, which is referred to as matchmaking, suggesting and recommending which professionals to connect with, which contributes to more assertive meetings”, stressed Thaís.

Furthermore, once a meeting has been confirmed by both parties, the participants can interact and share additional information and files via a dedicated chat, which results in more effective meetings.

The meeting requests can have customised messages and are available on ConnectMe for the other person to accept, decline, or suggest an alternative time. “When organising one’s agenda it is also possible to block timeslots in order to attend conferences, for example, preventing meetings from being requested during this period when the person is unavailable,” adds the executive, noting that the system automatically cross-references data between the two agendas and only makes available the timeslot options that are free for both parties.

It is now less than a month before the event gets underway and it is already possible to search profiles and request meetings using ConnectMe. Thaís stresses that professionals from all categories – exhibitors, buyers, press, and trade visitors – are authorised to schedule meetings via the platform. On the homepage, participants find the task management panel – which highlights what still needs to be done to increase exposure – and matchmaking – profile recommendations in accordance with that participant’s interest. “The more complete the profile is, the better the chances of receiving assertive recommendations and facilitating meetings within the target of each individual and company,” cautions the executive.

Exhibitors have an extra benefit when searching for meetings, since they have access to tabs that include the participants of the three buyer programs – Hosted Buyers, WTM Buyers’ Club and Agente na Estrada  [Agent on the Road] – to facilitate connections with these profiles.

Any participants who are interested in an exhibiting company on ConnectMe can also leave their virtual business card, further increasing the number of leads that the exhibitor can capture and the connections that can take place. “For this and other reasons, we say that contact with the participants and lead capture by the exhibitors begins even before the event gets underway,” Thaís points out.

In the 2022 edition, WTM Latin America registered six thousand meetings pre-scheduled using the platform, with an attendance rate of 88%. A third of these were assessed by exhibitors and buyers in terms of quality, with a score of 4.3 stars out of 5 possible stars. “This survey is important for us to understand how we can further innovate in terms of developing features that optimise connections,” concludes Thaís.

Service – WTM Latin America 2023

Date: April 3 to 5, 2023

Venue: Expo Center Norte Exhibition Centre – White and Green Pavilions

To register, all you need to do is to access in Portuguese, English or Spanish.