Although travel buyers have complaints about corporate self-booking software, its capability to highlight and push travelers toward preferred suppliers has never been one of them. Various means of indicating in availability displays a company's top choices according to price or policy have generally proven effective--supporting the tools' legendary "visual guilt."
But what about in the travel agent interface? As with other elements of the traditional global distribution system booking technology that many agents grew up on and still prefer, the ability for agency managers to favorably bias preferred suppliers has been limited. However, a new crop of tools is advancing that functionality, and travel buyers might want to take another look at whose suppliers their travel management companies' systems are preferencing--the TMC's or the customer's.
Sabre Travel Network by year-end plans to roll out its new Contract Optimization Services to enable the management of "multiple air supplier contracts with new sophisticated analytics, ultimately empowering the customer to present flight options at its agent point of sale that drive maximum value for both the agency and its corporate client base."
Travizon is among the TMCs testing the new Sabre service. "The automation assesses our airline contracts, and then takes it to the next level by baking in information about our booking trends, spend amount, even origin/destination data ... enabling us to control our display at the point of sale, determining which carrier gets what business," according to a press statement by Travizon chief financial and operating officer Matt Cummings. "We saw increased compliance immediately by more than 10 percent, and are able to track and measure compliance week over week."
Sabre's analysis found that the service enables TMCs to grow targeted bookings by up to 20 percent, collect as much as 10 percent more in supplier override (commission) revenues and reduce corporate travel spend by 5 percent.
Algorithms at the core of the GDS apply preferencing based on the user's current needs to support certain suppliers, and the results displayed to agents are sorted accordingly. "Order matters," said Sabre Holdings senior vice president Chris Kroeger.
Kroeger distinguished the new solution from existing "middleware" products in the marketplace that read the unfiltered search results and apply rules after the fact. But different generations of those products, too, have proven effective in making sure agents know which vendors their bosses want supported.
Atlas Travel International, Menno Travel Service and others are using BookingBuilder's Genie product, which monitors what agents are doing in the GDS and then responds to those key commands with programmed actions, like popping up a window that reminds the agent a certain airline is preferred on a given route.
"We tell the programs which 'triggers' to look for on the GDS screen (certain words/characters--e.g., vendor codes) and what actions to take when triggered," according to Kendal Sommers, technology manager at Menno Travel Service, which also uses the ResMarker product from Cornerstone Information Systems. "The programs can highlight in various colors the words/lines on the screen so they stand out to the agents. The programs can also display a dialog box containing whatever message we've loaded (booking instructions or info about a special promotion, etc.)."
Meanwhile, entirely new travel agent interfaces now in development by Amadeus, Farelogix and Travelport are expected to hit the U.S. market next year. Taking GDS functions off the traditional GDS platforms, these tools also could take agent guidance to another level. At-their-fingertips details on preferred providers, including contract displays and performance updates, would inform agents about supplier programs and customer needs better than ever before.
As agents become better equipped to drive market share--also known as "directional selling," as one corporate travel buyer called it--clients should redouble efforts to monitor whether they're pushing the right vendors, buyers said.
Asking not to be named in this article, one procurement specialist described the need to audit agent performance in this area: "In the data, you may see a disparity. You don't take the time to wallow in it--you can only do so much policing--but you do have to hold the TMC to your agreements."