Most Travel Managers approach a software evaluation with a familiar playbook: align with Procurement, define requirements, consider vendors, and make a selection. That works well for established software categories. But meeting planning software for small and midsize meetings requires a slightly different approach.
The gap you're trying to solve for, whether it’s fragmented planning, limited visibility, or inconsistent processes, exists because small meetings have historically been planned across different teams, departments, and tooling. They're coordinated in email threads and spreadsheets, planned informally, and rarely surfaced to travel programs in a consistent way.
That means choosing the right software starts with involving the right people. Your evaluation team should represent both the people who need visibility into small meetings and the people who plan them.
Executive Assistants should play a central role in the evaluation process. EAs are most often the ones responsible for planning the meetings. They coordinate attendees, research destinations, manage travel details, source venues, and keep track of the logistics required to bring a team together.
Travel Managers have a different set of priorities: program visibility, spend control, travel policy, supplier strategy, and consistent processes.
The right software needs to serve both.
Before evaluating meeting planning vendors, consider hosting a listening session with EAs or other meeting planners at your organization. Ask how they currently plan meetings, which tools they rely on, what takes up the most time, and which parts of the process create the most friction.
These conversations can give you better evaluation criteria than starting with a standard feature checklist.
Planner adoption is critical to your business case. If EAs and other planners don't consistently use the platform, Travel Managers won't gain the visibility they're looking for. Meeting activity, spend data, and reporting all depend on planners actually using the system.
A useful evaluation principle is simple: the platform should make planning easier for the EA while making meeting activity more visible to the Travel Manager.
Bring at least one experienced EA into vendor demos and workflow reviews. A feature may sound useful on paper, but the person doing the work can tell you whether it will actually fit into their process.
Procurement is an important part of any software evaluation. Vendor due diligence, security review, contract structure, and commercial terms all need to go through procurement.
But meeting planning software may not fit neatly into a category your procurement team has evaluated before. It can touch travel logistics, budgeting, attendee information, meetings, and multiple stakeholder groups.
Before procurement runs their standard process, give them context on what the software does, who will use it, and why the organization is considering it. Frame the business case around outcomes such as travel spend visibility, meeting planner efficiency, process consistency, and better oversight of small meeting activity. Most importantly, explain why planner adoption is central to achieving those outcomes.
If budgeting, reporting, or cost visibility are part of your business case, bring Finance into the conversation early.
Finance can help define the questions your reporting needs to answer:
Finance can also pressure-test your ROI assumptions before you start comparing vendors. They don’t need to participate in every demo. A working session early in the process can be enough to clarify financial reporting requirements and strengthen your evaluation criteria.
Human Resources (HR) or People Operations may also deserve a seat at the table, particularly if offsites, leadership summits, team gatherings, or other employee-focused meetings are a meaningful part of how your company operates.
These teams often have a stake in how meetings are planned and experienced, even if they aren't managing the travel program.
Their input can help you understand whether the platform supports the types of in-person meetings they care about and whether planners can work within company policies and expectations. If HR owns or influences a meaningful share of your internal meetings, capture their requirements before making a final decision.
Once you know who's involved and what each stakeholder needs, you can turn those perspectives into a more useful evaluation framework. Focus on a few key areas:
The goal isn't to find the meeting planning software with the longest feature list. It's to find one that works for the people planning meetings and the teams responsible for managing the broader program.
Taking these steps will put you in a much better position to choose software that works in practice, not just on paper.