Benefits of Face-to-Face Meetings

Business travel in India has got back its pace due to worldwide relaxations of travel restrictions. With that there has been a significant growth of face-to-face meetings. The innumerable benefits of face-to-face meetings has led to subsequent growth in business travel which remained dormant in the past few years. The benefits of face-to-face meetings are many, however, with our immense experience in business travel, we have listed few prominent benefits below.

1. Encourages trust building and professional relations

Face to face meetings offer lot of clarity to the participants as they happen through better communication and clear understanding of the topic of discussion. This process reduces the chances of misinterpretation of written texts that takes place over emails, proposals, presentations and other mode of non-verbal communications. Moreover, you can gauge the success of the meeting through body gestures, facial expressions and observing other micro behaviours that are difficult to understand in virtual meetings

Personal meetings are information rich reported by Lufthansa City Center Travels & Rentals

2. Personal meetings are information rich

Personal meetings often provide enormous scope of exchange of ideas which lead to opening of future opportunities. Especially in case of international business meetings, the nature of discussion changes with respect to region, people and other external factors that prevail in international destinations. Exchange of information is highly significant particularly when you are targeting international audience.

creative ideas evolve in face-to-face interactions reported by Lufthansa City Center Travels & Rentals

3. Scope for creative ideas

Undoubtedly, creative ideas find their ways mostly in face-to-face interactions. Especially, group business discussions generate lot of ideas and views that are new and can be implemented in better derived ways. For example, in post meeting sessions, the participants have the opportunity to mix up with each other over lunch or dinner which gives immense scope of informal discussions. Often these discussions lead to mix of ideas and creativity, sometimes productive business. Online meetings will obviously fail to organize informal interactions and thus minimal chances of doing business. The following graph is shown by ResearchGate calculating the number of ideas generated in various versions of business meetings.

4. Engagement rate is high resulting a focused approach

You can get easily distracted in online interactions due to several factors. Few of them could be internet issues, checking emails / online texts, snacking, social media engagements and so on. The case is completely different when you participate in physical interactions. You tend to be more focused, and participative because personal meetings shape up in question-answer formats more than the online ones. And more focused approach leads to better business transactions.

5. New business connections

Business development is one big factor of face-to-face meetings. The more you travel for your business the more you develop chances for new business acquisitions. New meetings, new people, new destinations are top influencers for better business, something which has a lesser chance in online meetings.

And its better in retaining long term relationships too. Most of the new business connections are formed in events, seminars and trade fairs where you get a pool of opportunity to interact with people.

6. Zero technical issues

Participants experience a lot of technical issues in online meetings. The most common of them are network issues, audio and video issues. One major but interesting issue is location. For example, a participant is attending a conference from his / her residence and there could be an accidental movement in the background by the participant’s family member. This could lead to a distraction and a break in the interaction. In face-to-face meetings you don’t have a chance for this because most of the serious business meetings will take place in either a conference hall or a meeting room.

One big advantage of face-to-face meeting is relation building and the lasting impact that people experience even after the meeting concludes. Face to face business meetings might had taken few steps back two years ago, but in recent times they have come back in full swing. Organizations and their business travelers can never deny the fact that face to face meetings always raise business opportunities more than the meetings conducted virtually. Certain reports from reputed magazines have revealed the effectiveness of business meetings over online discussions – Read here.

At Lufthansa City Center Travels & Rentals we create business opportunities by managing business travel over past few decades successfully. Our robust team of travel experts is taking care of reservations over flights, hotels and cars for business travelers around the globe by offering better fare, special deals and facilities. With our 24X7 emergency travel service we continue to provide better travel support to the corporate travelers across Asia Pacific, Middle East and Africa.