Name: Corporate Offsites 2025: What’s Changing and Why It Matters to Finance Teams
Uploaded: 2025-02-20T20:06:06.507Z
Duration: 50 min 32 s
Description: Corporate Offsites 2025: What’s Changing and Why It Matters to Finance Teams

Transcript for "Corporate Offsites 2025: What’s Changing and Why It Matters to Finance Teams": Great. Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us on our webinar, corporate offsites 2025, what's changing and why it matters to finance teams. My name is Taylor Decourt. I'm on the North American events team here at Imburse and your host for today's event. We're excited to have you guys here today to bring you some valuable content around maximizing your ROI for off-site events. Before we get started, just a quick housekeeping. Immerse in Motion is back. So be sure to register today if you guys are interested. We do have the QR code here for you to scan. We also have the link to, the events page under the docs tab off to the side. Today's webinar is also eligible for one CPE credit. Today in order to gain a CPE credit, you do have to participate in at least three poll questions. When the poll questions come up, all you have to do is click the response. Keep in mind there is no submit button, and we'll have those poll questions throughout the webinar today. This event is being recorded. You will receive the link to the recording following the event, typically about twenty four hours after recording is done. I wanna point out the engagement area on your right. We do encourage that you ask questions. You can do so under the q and a tab. We also included some helpful resources for you like that registration and events page under the documents tab. Chat is also available today, so feel free to engage with us and your fellow webinar attendees. Now I'm gonna invite Curtis Socha and Adrianna Carpenter onto the stage here and introduce them for you guys. Perfect. Thanks for joining, guys. We're really excited here. We have some great speakers. Adrianna Carpenter is the chief financial officer at Imbursed. Adrianna has over thirty years of experience in finance and accounting. She has extensive experience in financial strategy, m and a, public company operations, and multinational accounting. We also have Curtis Scioca, who is the vice president of product management here at Adverse. Curtis has over twenty three years in corporate travel technology and oversees many aspects of Imverse's travel platforms. So with that, I'm happy to pass off this webinar to Adrianna and Curtis to tell us how we can maximize our ROI with corporate offsites this year. Thanks so much, Taylor. Really appreciate the intro, and welcome, everyone. We're really excited to to have you here today. You know, what we wanna cover is some results that we found. Back in November, we did a survey of 2,000 people, and these individuals spanned across, all sizes of businesses. So we had about a third of the respondents were in what we would call a small company called two to 100 two to 100 employees. About a third were in midsize companies, so a hundred to 500 employees. And then a third were in sort of these larger companies, 500 plus. So a nice cross section of of individuals who responded to this to this survey. And what we really wanted to know was, what is happening across companies with, corporate offsites? How are companies thinking about these types of events? And how have they changed over time? And we found five key trends that, one, we wanna just talk about the trends that we're seeing, which you can see on the page. Right? Companies definitely are increasing their investments in these areas. They're changing how they're utilizing these corporate offsites. Their, the way in which employees go and travel to these offsites has has been trending differently. And and we're also seeing how employees are thinking about how they spend their money and time at these offsites. And what is happening with those companies that self report as sort of being ahead of their curve? Meaning, when we were, deploying the survey, we asked these respondents, hey. Is your company performing ahead of your plan? Are you kind of at your plan? Are you behind a little bit in your plan? And those companies, that were reporting that they are really exceeding, and high performing, really over performing against their their targets, we wanna talk about some of the trends that they're that they were doing, that these companies are doing to really get that engagement across these off sites. So excited to really talk about this. And we have Curtis here who, you know, we're gonna be sharing a lot of different ideas of if these are the trends, what are the things that you could be doing within your own policies, systems, processes that can help really bring back an ROI or really bring back and increase the engagement that you're getting from these types of investments? Because let's face it, corporate offsites, that's a true investment in money, time and money, both across your employees that are going to the offsites, but also just the the cost of holding these types of type of offsites. And how do you as a company get the most out of it. So excited to jump into the topic today. So first, before we get into it, let's have our first polling question. So love to hear from all of you, how many corporate off sites does your company hold annually? And try to think of this, it doesn't have to be the entire corporation. What we're also seeing in some trends is that companies are sort of bifurcating. Maybe it's the sales and marketing org that's having an off-site. Maybe there's a, you know, more of a back office, g and a type off-site. So think about it from all the ways in which your company is engaging to get employees together at some sort of event outside of the office, and the frequency of that. So this is what I always love to see is sort of how many people are coming in and and and sort of where, you know, where this is landing. So it looks like I mean, 45% is saying that they have more than five offsites annually, which is pretty significant. I mean, I would guess, Curtis, you know, maybe this is more what I was referring to where you're bifurcating, each of your groups and each one of those functional areas is having an off-site. Yeah. Absolutely. So, yeah. So, again, it's like we we see that bifurcation one to two, offsites, five plus. So that one to two sort of suggests if you're having a company wide, you might just have one or two. If you're gonna have more cost maybe functions, you're gonna have a few more. So let's delve in a little bit into sorry. Before we get to the next section, let's have our second polling question. Which of the following corporate off-site trends have you noticed in your organization? And please select all that, all that apply. So companies, are you gonna increase your investment in off-site? Are you are they becoming more social? Or how you travel, how you're allowing your employees to travel, what modes they're allowed to use, is that changing? Employees' personal costs, balancing that, for stronger worker connections. Are you seeing any of that? And then, you know, are you seeing if you're a high performing company, are you changing are you seeing a change in how you're approaching these types of offsites? So I love it here. We're seeing so definitely, offsites are becoming more social. What else have we got here? Business travel preferences are evolving, and high performing companies are setting the new standards. Those seem to be the leaders here. And it really is mapping, I think, Curtis in line of a lot with what we've seen in today. Very, very close. I I agree. No surprises. Yeah. Right? No surprises. So y'all are trending just like just like the survey, so that's interesting. Now if we can get the slide deck maybe back up. Yep. Here we go. So what we are seeing then is, we are seeing that companies are, are increasing the amount of investments that they are making in these types of offsites. 59% of finance teams reported this increase since 02/2019. Some of the ways in which they're expanding, the their their investment is they're expanding the attendance, of who is joining, so it's a broader audience that is being invited to these types of offsites. We're also seeing higher quality of accommodations, higher quality of the food. And, you know, basically, when you show up, it's not at a budget inn. It's gonna be maybe at a at a better sort of resort or that type of thing. We also saw higher investments in, better activities and better entertainment options that are being offered as employees are going to these off sites. Better merchandise, you know, the swag that you're getting, about 43% of our participants said that they're they're increasing their budget there. And then there about 35% said that they're extending or increasing, the length of the corporate off site. So those are the ways in which we're seeing those investment dollars increase through those types of levers. The other thing that the other thing that we're seeing is that when you go to an off-site, it used to be work was the central focus. So you're going to an off-site and, boy, your agenda is packed solid with all of the things that, you know, you're trying to accomplish from a work perspective. But companies are really evolving and saying, look, we really need to make these offsites a lot more balanced. And in fact, you can see here that only 36% of the time allotted in a off-site is dedicated to true, like, focused work time activities. The rest of the time, leisure and relaxation, socializing, sort of that networking, team building, really getting those teams to connect. Those are really the drivers and have become it's a really big it's a shift in how companies are approaching this. And think about it. You know, we have seen a decentralization of companies having a lot more employees that don't go into the office every single day. I know that there is this push of return to work, but we're not there yet. We're still seeing a lot of those remote type workers, and that need and that drive to bring those employees together is really important. And what we're seeing also is that those companies that are reporting as being higher performing are really leaning heavily into what I would call, you know, the two thirds of this pie versus the one third. They're really trying to drive that employee engagement by really enhancing the activities that are available and what where the focus is in these corporate off-site events. Yeah. So, Curtis, I think that there might be a few ways that companies can, I guess, engage with technology to help manage this type of type of outcome, if you will? Absolutely, Adriana. So when you look at this pie chart, one of the things that encompasses is is is kind of a macro view of your event agenda. This is how companies are splitting up the event. But when it comes to actually managing the event, there's a couple things you need to take into consideration. For very, very small events, those can usually be handled, you know, through calendar and email or or Slack and and small agendas. But when you start graduating to dozens or or hundreds of attendees, coordinating these events become more complicated. So one of the things that ensures engagement and, you know, your return on investment is partially attributed to people being on time, knowing where they're supposed to go, being able to know when there's a change of plans on demand across the whole attendee list. So we would recommend you invest in an event coordination mobile application, and there's a a few different organizations out there that provide these types of technology. And what these do is is they often have, like, built in chat channels for your employees to be able to, socialize and communicate together. Of equal importance, your event coordinators can push notifications out to all attendees. You know, there could be disruptions with transportation. There could be changes in venue at last minute, and that kind of disruption can really fragment the event and make it discoordinated. Also, each of these types of platforms have pretty robust AI capabilities. They can help you plan and customize your agendas based based on schedules and timings of attendees. So these organizations that provide these mobile apps are here to complement your construction of the event and then feedback to you real time analytics so you can make in the moment decisions to improve that overall experience. But once the event is done, you've got the post event tasks that you need to do. You need to track engagement and get key takeaways, and you will do this through post event surveys. So, those surveys that are sent out can also be provided by these types of organizations that offer these solutions, and they will use AI to do an analysis on the response to get insight into your attendee sentiment without necessarily having to go line by line with all the responses. You can get an overall feeling. Were they happy with the event? What was like? What was not like? And it can be summarized for you automatically. And I think this now leads into what we like to call embracing bleisure. So back to you, Adrianna. I mean, I love that. And I will say, you know, we actually, at Inverse, just had a recent off-site, and we utilized this type of technology. Yes. And it really brought a lot of engagement. Everyone knew where they needed to go. Everyone knew when there was a new a change in in, you know, a segment dinner went someplace else. Hey. You need to be in a different place. It really by by really utilizing the tech that is available to you, can really make for a very personalized experience for each employee because you can also change the alerts depending on who the employee is. So certain groups will get some messaging and other groups will get other you know, a a different type of messaging. Maybe team a needs to go to this restaurant, team b needs to go to a different restaurant. You can put all of that through the app and really give people real time notification. So, you know, again, highly encourage the leaning into adopting the kind of technology that will enable and really further improve and enhance the experience. When we just talked about the fact that those budgets are increasing and how much we're investing in these type of off-site events. I know somebody asked the question, what is an off-site? When I'm talking off-site, what I really mean is when you're having a corporate event outside of your office, so you're, you know, going out to a particular hotel or resort and maybe having a company kickoff activity, I use that word off-site. That's really what I'm referring to. And this is the way that you wanna make sure when you're spending all of that money to bring, you know, however many employees, 50 employees, a hundred employees, to these off-site events, you really wanna be getting, one, you wanna understand what kind of return am I getting from that? It's not just financial, it's that engagement feedback. And how are your employees, you know, feeling about the event? Do they feel like they know where they need to go? Is there confusion? If if there is, these by enabling this type of technology, you can get that feedback real time and be adjusting real time. Hey, team. We need to get some communication out because we're getting feedback from our attendees. They don't know where to go. They don't understand the agenda. They don't whatever. You know, fill in the blank. That's what this technology helps to enable. And I'll I'll also add to that that as an attendee who's used these, it's just really cool. It it feels very professional, very slick, and it's a low amount of effort, to implement something like that and get that kind of reception from your attendees. Yeah. So let's talk about some other tools that we can use because we just talked about the fact that when we are putting on these corporate events, we can spend a lot of money. I mean, if you're gonna put on a company kickoff, let's say, and you have have, you know, you wanna bring hundreds of employees to a particular event, this type of information is extremely important. So maybe, Curtis, you can help us think through how we can better adopt and make sure that we're doing all the things we can to get the most out of our money. Absolutely. So when we talk about video selection, obviously, when people coordinate events, they need to go pick where it's going to happen. If you're planning on doing an event, say, at a hotel and on property at a hotel conference location, you you should take into account that if you're doing this independently just on your own, it's potential potential that you're not going to get the best, rates from that hotel. You could leverage, again, a third party organizations who specialize in the procurement process of scheduling and managing the event, procurement with that hotel. And this could deal with, how big is the conference room needing to be for the number of attendees. And then you get into for very complex events, if you have a travel management company, you could consider working directly with them as well. And they may actually be licensing some of the very tools, I was talking about, who handle that kind of procurement. But they may have special relationships and discounts with those hotels that you could get a get gain benefit from through going through your TMC. So there's a couple different things to consider there, but you don't necessarily have have to do it alone. There's really great organizations out there who can help you with those. So when you look at the venues, you want to try to find those that really foster engagement away from office distractions. And you'll go of course, ensure that the space accommodates all the attendees. The other thing when you talk about just picking the right timing of when to hold your event, You should take into account seasonal patterns, weather season seasonal powers. Even flu season can impact how many people attend the event or end up canceling, which I'll talk about here in a moment. You can also look to try to book in an off season to get better rates and discounts on those conference centers. So there's some pre planning and research and, of course, your if you have a TMC or one of these third party companies, they'll they'll be able to guide you on when those best times are, particularly for a given area, or location that you're you're planning. When we talk about attrition and cancellation, terms, one of the things that impacts any event is people plan, they book their flights, you block the room hotel, and for any any number of last minute reasons, they can't make it. Well, that can contractually put your organization into a a bit of a difficult situation with, the hotel depending upon how you negotiated that relationship. So you wanna avoid surprises. Make sure you look at the attrition and cancellation terms, because again, seasonal weather flu can significantly impact. And when you look at attrition, particularly, there's a couple different aspects of that. You could look at percentage based attrition clauses where maybe the percentage a percentage of your room cost, still has to be paid, but maybe not the full price for nonattendance. Or look at a gradual attrition fee structure where perhaps you're allowed to have, you know, x number of, rooms canceled before the fee coverage graduates up a tier scale. And then then you could also negotiate with the hotel a attrition fee fee, attrition free period where you could cancel up to, you know, 5% of the attendees before any fees kick in. The point is is look at those attrition clauses. They could directly impact you and try to negotiate the one maybe best on seasonality, maybe best on your own experiences and what's going on in your organization, and pick the one that puts you in the best position to not incur additional costs. And very similar to that is cancellation terms. You've got tiered cancellation deadlines. You could have force majeure clauses for, natural disasters that you wanna make sure you protect yourself. Maybe it's during flood season. Partial cancellation allowances where you can cancel n number of hotel, rooms within thirty days advance without penalty. Some may do 60. Some may do 90. Try to negotiate those terms that protect your organization the best. And last but not least, you could request concessions upfront. I always like to, remind myself of one of my favorite quote is, what is the worst they can say? No? So ask them for extra points. Ask them for waived fees on parking. Get that complimentary cocktail. Get your free breakfast for your staff. Get free breakout rooms. And if they say yes, this just provides more return on what is effectively no investment just simply by asking for those concessions upfront. And, Curtis, you know, it's been one, I just wanna make a clarification for TMC. When we say that, we mean travel management companies. So that it's it's like your travel agency. They likely will have these relationships with these venues to help negotiate better terms. So definitely, you know, to the extent that you have a travel agency or a travel management company, you wanna leverage that. One of the things that the data revealed in our survey is that we did see that higher performing companies are really thinking about remember I talked about that pie chart, one third work related, two thirds really kind of social, emotional engagement, that type of, those type of activities. So when they're thinking about venues, they are thinking about booking primarily in resorts, at restaurants. You know, off sites don't have to be multi day events. They can be. They can be like a company kickoff where you're gonna have maybe, you know, a whole day of sort of welcome to the to the new year and here's our strategy for the year and then and then a couple of days of maybe breakout sessions and the like. Or it could be simply literally a team, a large team, or maybe it's the whole company, going to a restaurant for half a day and really bifurcating sort of that type of thing. And what we were seeing is that, you know, when we looked at what high performing companies were were booking, 50% chose restaurants versus, say, like, a hotel conference area. 39% chose retreats and those types of venues like a resort. Because what they're really looking for is to get that employee engagement and interaction. So I thought that was pretty interesting, that we were seeing that coming through in the results of the survey. So as we are thinking about these types of events, what are companies doing with their travel policies? So a lot of this, you need to adjust your your company policies to provide and allow for these types of shifts in how companies are thinking about employee engagement. So, this embracing leisure travel, expanding inclusion partner policies, meaning if you're gonna have an event, do you allow an employee to bring a partner with them? Maybe you will, maybe you will pay for part of that, maybe you won't, but these are the things that you need to be thinking about as you want to expand your usage of corporate events and corporate off sites. You should think about the policy selection you have of what of how your employees would travel to those events, how you want to, really drive, you know, it says drive this performance driven travel culture. And what that really is referring to is you wanna make sure your employee is having this positive travel experience. So we can even think about when they're booking travel to go to an event. You know, are you gonna allow them to fly direct or are you gonna make them take the cheapest the cheapest flight? Are you going to allow them to use their preferential airlines or you're gonna force them through a particular, you know, you you have a package with United and everybody has to fly United. So all of these things you want to start to think about, how do you wanna change your overall policies to align with what we're seeing through the survey and and and really what these higher performing companies are doing is they are providing that optionality to their employees. Because, you know, if you think about a direct flight versus an indirect flight, well, this day and age, boy, it there actually is probably more savings by allowing that person to go direct than to have the one stop because we're seeing a lot of people getting stuck in locations, and the trip ends up costing even more because they have to stay overnight. They don't get to they they miss out on the event altogether. Like, that is a true impediment to the whole reason you're having the event to begin with. So really encourage you to really, like, go back and look at your policies and think about ways in which you want to change them in order to encourage and increase that, that employee adoption. So now that we've changed our policies, how are we going to implement and affect them? There are all kinds of tools, not just in versus, all kinds that allow you to put up your policies through a booking tool that will basically allow employees to take advantage and guide them through what you want them to do. So if you wanna allow your employees to, to book with their their preferred airline, but you still wanna put some parameters in place into maybe the, the type of service, you know, the the the the, whether you're gonna fly economy or or business or or what have you, you can build all of those policies into an online booking tool that will, one, first of all, you know, allow your employee to very easily go in and book your travel. You can also, you know, want to make sure you're giving your employee the best type of experience. The type of applications that Curtis was talking about earlier, you can marry in and make sure that your employees have a mobile app that is gonna basically allow them to book their travel, you know, that will then seamlessly provide them access to what is happening at the conference, That will also allow them allow you to push notifications to the employee while traveling. So really think holistically as you're thinking about the type of, technology that you're going to enable, that it's gonna allow that type of employee experience that's easy for them to use, but also permit you and me as a CFO to really enable the appropriate policies that we want in order to limit costs, but also encourage engagement. So it is a balance. Don't do it manually. You've gotta really leverage that technology. The other thing I would say is with the adoption of, of AI and all that is available through all of these technologies, this notion of reshopping these rates that you are having your employees book at is really powerful. We are seeing our customers who adopt a reshop technology that they can save upwards to 20% of what their overall travel costs are. This is across hotel and airline. There are real savings to be had that really does not minimize the employee experience and where they stay or how they travel. And so, you know, as you think about, one, the experience that you're getting in your off-site, you wanna also think in the you know, I think of it as, well, how is am I as a CFO thinking about what I can enable, in order to just capture savings that is right there for the picking? Doesn't change my user experience, but it actually puts a return in my pocket and actually can can support and and actually underwrite a big portion of your cost. So, really make sure you're thinking about how you're adopting that technology and, partnering it with your pairing it with your policies and really capturing those end to end savings. A couple other things we put on there to think about, you know, we talked about direct flights, but also, you know, think about how you can mobilize individuals to share rides, things like that. Again, if you have these mobile apps, things of that nature, when your employee lands, it's like, I see you've landed. Great. These are your three options in getting to the hotel. The preferred way is go find the bus that is labeled, you know, if it's burst, like, in burst bus to go to x y z resort or whatever it is. Right? You wanna be able to make it simple for the employee to figure out what you want them to do, and that's where you wanna leverage the technology. And that's also gonna help you kind of control, limit your costs, which is how I will say as a CFO I'm constantly thinking about. So one of the other interesting, what I thought was a super interesting takeaway from this survey, was that we went and asked the survey respondents, when you are asked to join some sort of off-site event, do you feel a financial burden for doing so? And, you know, when I saw the original question, I thought in my head, well, how could there be a financial burden? Like, the company's gonna pay for the hotel, they're gonna pay for their travel like it should be. There shouldn't be one. But in fact, there really is. If you really step back and then when we see the results of the survey, the cost of there is a true financial burden. 25% of of the respondents said, I actually feel a big burden. And what was even more interesting is when you looked at it by generation, our Gen Zs and our Millennials, our our younger participants felt a much larger burden. And some of the things that they were saying are, look, one, a lot of times, I don't have a corporate credit card. I have to outlay the costs of me just, you know, traveling through an airport. I need to buy lunch. I need to, you know, pay for baggage fees. There's certain things, incidentals, while I'm traveling that if I don't have a corporate card, in a lot of cases, we don't expand corporate card usage to people, you know, to the full company. Sometimes a lot of individuals who attend these types of events are not frequent travelers, so maybe they wouldn't have a corporate card. Maybe they travel once a year to one of these events. And so there is a financial burden in that they have to outlay the cost, they have to charge it, and then they have to put in a reimbursement. And that delay, that timing delay, really could require them they might have to pay their credit card bill before they even get reimbursed. If they don't have the funds to pay it, they could be incurring interest charges, late fees, etcetera. So there is a real impact, and there is a solution for that that we're gonna talk about that really you should be thinking about as you're, you know, expanding the types of individuals and employees who are gonna participate in these types of events. Child care. People when you're out of town, you have child care, pet care. I know putting a dog and, you know, boarding a dog is very expensive. Having someone at your house, like, these are all true costs. I also love the the new clothes. Like, okay. Well, I'm gonna, I haven't seen anyone in like six months and I gotta make a good impression and I have to buy a new outfit to to go to these events. So, you know, it's interesting as you think about the psyche of the employee and what they're considering a personal burden to them, again, as you think about this, do you want to provide stipends for certain things? I'm not saying, you know, you're gonna cover cost of a new outfit, but there could be ways in which you want to provide, you know, some some financial, relief for these types of things. In Curtis, you know, how do we think about ways in which companies can do that? Well, Adriana, we've got virtual cards. And, one of the great things about virtual cards is these are integrated virtual payment systems. And depending upon what solutions you're using, like, travel and expense platforms, they offer robust solutions for, managing block rooms for large groups. You get this is assisted by automating payments. You can enforce, your spend control, simplify your reconciliation, and, really, organizations achieve a greater efficiency, accuracy, and security in their accommodation process. It also reduces administrative burden and enhances the experience for the organization and the attendees. So when you look at, like, the traditional way of handling things where you reserve a block room, a block of hotel rooms, and then, maybe assign a single corporate card to each hotel room, manually track individual folios and expenses. You know, as you go through the start to end process here, you end up having to reconcile the expenses post event, and sometimes you get this delays and can discrepancies, so on and so forth. With virtual cards, you can generate a unique virtual card linked to each attendee's reservation. These can be automatically charged at check-in with real time transactions logged. And the beautiful thing is on the back end, this automatically reconciles expenses with the TNE system. So you're you'll have your So does that mean no expense report or what exactly does that mean when you say that? Automatically, reconcile the expenses with the t and e system. So the, it manifest of those transactions through the virtual card from the banking system get fed directly into the, expense system and attached to the e wallet of the traveler, for expensing. And So think about that experience. I just wanna I wanna pause on that for a minute because when you do this right so think about this. You're gonna have 200 employees at an event, and you enable this type of technology where for all 200 employees, you said, everybody has a virtual card. You get $50, hundred dollars, whatever it is for incidentals. And also, when you check-in, this virtual card is gonna be paying for your particular hotel room. So what's gonna happen, your employee's gonna show up. They're gonna be able to take their virtual card, check-in, pay for their hotel room, they have this virtual card available to them to pay for the coffee in the morning, what whatever it might be, their their their incidentals. Every time they're using it, it is basically that that transaction is automatically going into the TNE system that that you have, into the expense reporting system, automatically take bringing over all the data, the receipts, etcetera. In some cases, if the data feed isn't robust enough, you'll get an alert on your phone that says, hey, I saw that you just used this. Please take a picture of the receipt. And you'll take a picture, and then everything is already there for the traveler. So now the employee is done with their event. They haven't used a personal card. They go into their expense system. Maybe they maybe they bought dinner for two people, and so they need to itemize and say this was for me and and and Curtis. He and I went to dinner together, and so I'm just noting who was who was there. And then it and then that's it. They're submitting it. There's nothing else for them to do. They're not walking around with a bunch of paper. They're not having to figure it out after the fact. The fact that this streamlines the employee experience, but also realize when you're issuing those virtual cards, you can put a limit. I'm only gonna give you a hundred bucks to spend, and once you've missed the hundred, like, once you're over the hundred, like, that's it, it already sort of predefines and you you tell your your individuals what you're what they're allowed to spend so they go in knowing. So that can help from that perspective. But then it also can help if the employee doesn't use it. There's no harm, no foul, then the virtual card then expires, and the rest of the funds are just unused, and you're not trying to call it back. So it's not like in the old days you would advance someone, I'll give you an advancement for your trip, and then if they don't use it, you have to sort of reconcile and and and the like. So I just wanted to highlight the way in which when you truly are leveraging this, it's not just not only do you get a better employee experience, but you're also getting so much stronger controls around the spend, the insta visibility. It's just end to end really just a supreme experience. Sorry, Curtis. I just I get excited about this because to me, it's like I have real time visibility. I already know what my predefined limit is. I'm not gonna be surprised later when everybody finally submits their expense reports, you know, whatever, a week, two weeks, a month later, two months later, and all of a sudden, like, all these expenses come rolling in that everybody charged on their own personal cards, I you you you you basically get rid of that scenario through this mechanism. Correct. Yeah. Okay. So what else are we seeing? So the other things that we're seeing is, you know, again, when I talked about how, companies were people the end of the respondents were sort of self reporting. Those that self reported high performing, meaning we're we're we're crushing it. Like, we're killing our budget. Like, we're well above. Sales are great. Profit's great. You You know, we all wanna be part of the high performing companies. What what types of trends are we seeing? On average, they have 2.8 annual events per year. Low performing, those that really aren't meeting their goals or are underperforming relative to their goals, slightly less. So think about that as, you know, as we're seeing engagement through these offsites, those high performing are doing more than the underperforming. 72% of employees express excitement for off-site. So people are loving it. Really, that's a lot. That's pretty high engagement. When you're thinking about, you know, getting those engagement scores up and how do you really start to connect with the hearts and minds of your employees, this is a really great tool, a really great avenue in order to to really increase that engagement and participation across your your company. 49% versus low performing. One of the things that we talked about, I think, at the front, and I wanna connect it to this 49% show enthusiasm for offsites. When we looked at, lower performing companies versus higher performing companies, lower performing companies were really leaning much more heavily on offsites to get work done. So their percentage mix of how they were focused in an off-site, it was majority of the focus was in work mode. And they were also sort of the ones to be booking those off sites at a corporate, you know, sort of, we're all gonna be in a conference room. We might be in a hotel, but you're gonna be in a conference room the whole time, and we're all gonna be working real hard. Versus high performing said, look, we we need to get some work done. Like, they're like, we we can't pass up the opportunity when everyone's together to get work done, but we're also here to engage, to have fun, to socialize, to network, to just have a release. And I you know, that's really coming through in these results here. High performing, 90% report a stronger company connection versus 71%. Again, sort of that dynamic of how you're utilizing those off sites. And, my I mean, I guess sort of my favorite or my least favorite, but those it it's expressed expressed dread. There's there's a small population that still really I don't really wanna socialize. I just wanna stay at home. So we are gonna have a little bit of that. So let's take our poll question number three. Which takeaways will you be implementing for your next off-site? Virtual cards, airline loyalty programs, mobile event app, my my favorite, imburse book, imburse reshop. So when we say that, what we really mean is an online booking tool. You know, will you engage and use those online booking tools to facilitate policy enforcement and ease of use by your employees? Reshop, which is that automatic reshopping, capturing savings, no change to your employee experience. I'm surprised I don't see a single vote for reshop. You should think that is free money to you. Everyone should be thinking about reshop and adoption because it truly you know, you'll keep the same airline seat. You'll keep the same type of room. It all it's doing, because rates are constantly changing, is just saying, hey. I'm just gonna, through technology, look at every second that the rate changes. And anytime there's a change in rate that's lower, we're booking it, and you get the savings right back. And so it's this no it's this easy way in which you can gain money. I haven't I don't have any takers yet, Curtis. I I like to think of it as somebody who's working while you're sleeping to save you money. And it's relentless, and it does it all day long right up to the event. Yeah. Virtual cards. Truly, it is a really great way to enable and really help your employees, make it really seamless. And, again, speaking as the CFO, I always love it because it really helps with, just managing the overall spend and no surprises at the end. And so I highly encourage as well. It's one of those things that once you understand how it works and really get the right technology in place, you'll never go back. Alright. So we are coming close to the end here. Do we have any questions that we are seeing? Let's see. It looks like we have a question on the app. So on the mobile app. So someone is asking the question about, oh, wait. Here we go. Does the virtual card link to a person's phone wallet, or is it only within Chrome River, or what we are now calling enterprise? The the virtual card does, it it is part of yes. It's all seamless. So the virtual card can be issued either from enterprise. It can be issued from various but, you know, if you have an AmEx program or any other kind of program, there are ways in which you can get different, card programs and issue virtual cards through those programs as well. For the most part, the virtual card again, it depends on who the issuer is, if it's AmEx, Citi, an inverse card, what whatever type of card. Most will go into a wallet. Some some, there might be some geographic limitations. So it's sort of generally yes, and it depends on who your issuer is and and how that technology works. But in most cases, we can we you can get it to to go to a wallet. Yes. That's how you would Yeah. Get it. And we did, answer that question in the chat, but thank you for that, Adriana. It looks like we have another question here. Does the use of virtual card or other services make it easier to obtain guest folios from the hotels? So, Curtis, you know, yesterday, we were just actually chatting with a customer about some applications that can sort of provide those virtual cards, that work with hotels. And maybe you can talk a little bit about that and how that works. Sure. So virtual cards or similar payment systems, they they can make it easier to to obtain guest folio information. A lot of expense systems have integrations with either the hotel system or a way to, bring in that folio information automatically directly into the system once the virtual card is charged, and that can help streamlining the process. Also, some hotel chains have direct partnerships with these platforms to ensure that folios are shared in real time for easier reconciliation. Perfect. Thanks, Curtis. Yeah. It looks like we have about a minute left if there's any other, last minute questions that we can answer here. Give everybody a second. I do wanna just say thank you so much to Adriana and Curtis for an incredible presentation. We really appreciate you guys and the content that you've provided. It looks like we do have one more question here. Is there an inverse reshop equivalent for personal travel? That's a very good question. I think we'd have to take that as a a takeaway. Great. I believe there is I've never heard of one. I believe it there there are there was. I believe there was at what point. I don't know if it's still active, however. But that's a great question. Love love to go research that. Yes. And any questions that we can't get to today, if you wanna throw them in the chat, we will still make sure to get to them outside of this webinar. We will reach out directly to you guys. But with that, we are at time. So thank you everybody so much for attending. We appreciate you joining our webinar, corporate offsites twenty twenty five, what's changing and why it matters to finance teams. We hope you have a great day. Bye, everyone. Thank you. Bye, everybody. Thank you.