Merrill Lynch this month began migrating the Asia/Pacific part of its travel program onto a follow-the-sun platform, with after-hours Hong Kong calls being routed through the United Kingdom. By year-end, vice president of global travel services Karen Hutchings expects some after-hours U.S. calls to be processed through a service center in Asia/Pacific, most likely Australia, pending the arrival of new telephony in the United States, which is planned for Dec. 1.
So far, the company has consolidated 29 out of the 32 countries in which it operates with a single travel management company, HRG, and has yielded vastly improved data and cost efficiency to the travel department and better service for travelers.
When Asia/Pacific points-of-sale are brought onto the 24-hour service platform, through which U.K. after-hours calls continue to be routed to the United States, Merrill Lynch will join the few companies that successfully have implemented a follow-the-sun travel service configuration. However, Merrill Lynch's efforts differ from those of follow-the-sun pioneers Cisco Systems, General Electric, Wal-Mart and Oracle in that those companies opted for one global distribution system provider and one online booking tool globally
(BTNonline, Sept. 10, 2007), while Merrill Lynch applies a "best in country" philosophy toward technology suppliers and is reluctant to deploy self-booking to smaller and emerging markets.
Merrill Lynch, which in September agreed to be acquired by Bank of America, began its travel globalization process in 2003, but the pace accelerated after Hutchings joined the company's global travel services team in February 2007. Its operational configuration with HRG includes a 10-country European service center in London, and follow-the-sun 24-hour service from centers based on three continents.
In addition, complex itineraries involving more than three sectors are being routed through an HRG global pricing desk in Manchester, U.K., and Merrill Lynch has started to use its consolidated data to increase multinational deals with airlines and hotels.
One of the main advantages for the travel services department has been scale. Seventy percent of Merrill Lynch's travel originates in the United States and United Kingdom, making it difficult for the company to justify a full-time travel management company booking consultant in many of the countries with smaller spend. Hutchings said a single travel management company also has made it easier to implement such projects as a new hotel program or a corporate booking tool.
According to Hutchings, Hong Kong has an online booking tool, but little usage, while the country's travelers average 20 calls per offline booking. By contrast, U.K. travelers average six calls and U.S. travelers just three. "There is a myth out there that you need to roll out an online booking tool in every single country," Hutchings said. "You implement them when the country is ready to have them."
Merrill Lynch uses the Sabre GDS in North America and Amadeus and Galileo for Europe, the Middle East and Africa and Asia. Concur Cliqbook is the preferred online booking tool in the United States. Merrill Lynch uses HRG Online in the United Kingdom, Switzerland and Hong Kong and others elsewhere. It also uses the Concur Expense platform in the United States, which it plans to roll out next year in EMEA and Japan. Meanwhile, American Express is the investment bank's corporate card provider, except in the Middle East and its private client wealth division.
As Merrill Lynch concentrates on finishing consolidating travel agency services in its largest regions, consolidation in the Middle East also is underway. There is a consolidated service center in Dubai and plans for consolidating Bahrain, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the rest of the United Arab Emirates into the center.
Once HRG completes implementations in the Middle East, Russia and South America, only Brazil, half of India and Uruguay will be through local agencies for air bookings, even though those countries currently book hotel with HRG. "We do that because we don't really want to give all these agencies our hotel rates," Hutchings said.
With a culture of not mandating policy, communication has been the oil that has lubricated the accomplishments at Merrill Lynch. "The number-one factor is getting buy-in from the business," Hutchings said. "The case has to be so compelling that your internal stakeholders cannot reasonably say no to it. You have to explain what you are doing, why you are doing it and the benefits to all concerned because you will be more successful if everyone understands the business reasons."
Hutchings explained the benefits to travelers and the travel services department of the travel management company consolidation through a series of messages to stakeholders, including country managers, CFOs, business managers and travel bookers. She pledged that a single travel management company would deliver the same standard of service that travelers already received from incumbent travel management companies and more. A single TMC worldwide, she told them, was the only way to provide 24-hour service from staff dedicated solely to managing Merrill Lynch travelers, and consequently with much better knowledge of company culture and relationships with preferred suppliers.
Another advantage she said was the ability to access hotel deals negotiated in other markets, all of which would be fed into a single database to be used worldwide.
Another benefit is Merrill Lynch's use of the HRG global pricing desk to find savings on bookings of more than three sectors. Hutchings said the HRG agents at the Manchester desk are proving particularly successful at finding savings for trips to more than one continent.
Previously, complex trips were routed to a pricing desk in Halifax, Canada, for North American bookings and the United Kingdom for EMEA points of sale. At the Manchester desk, Hutchings said, "You get better fare specialists because of the markets they're used to dealing with in EMEA, and they deal with a lot broader travel patterns. It made more sense from a timing perspective because it sits in the middle."
Perhaps the biggest advantage of a consolidated program is improved management information data, which has aided in garnering multinational air and hotel deals. Instead of sourcing and integrating data from different TMCs in each region, Hutchings said data accuracy "is a million miles ahead of where we were. Consolidating with one TMC globally has vastly improved our access to data and our ability to get reports on a global, regional, country or business group level. Previously, we had to deal with multiple account managers, management information systems and so on."
Meanwhile, consolidation is not the only strategy for negotiating air deals. Merrill Lynch has a handful of deals with carriers for nine or 10 countries, but the majority are for two countries, to ensure no carrier has a monopoly on any route.
Hutchings also has allowed regional differences to overrule consolidation in several other respects. One is the European service center.
"We have 10 countries booking travel through the dedicated HRG service center in London," she said. "We won't put any more countries in there, such as Russia and South Africa, because the way they operate, such as their distribution systems, are very different. You have to be honest about your limitations, because if you try to impose ways of working where they don't make sense, the whole operation could potentially end up a failure."