Advito Adds Odom And Hotel, Air Tools

George Odom, former Eli Lilly and Co. leader of travel and meetings services, has joined Advito, the separate consulting division of BCD Travel, as senior director of global business development, the company announced today. Meanwhile, the consulting division also announced enhancements to its air and hotel program management services and tools, as well as its benchmarking service.

Odom, who for 16 years served as the head of Eli Lilly's travel services department, will assume his new position later this month at the start of the National Business Travel Association International Convention & Exposition. He recently retired from his role at the Indianapolis-based pharmaceutical company, according to Advito vice president of business intelligence Maria Chevalier. He will be based in Indiana and will report directly to vice president of global business development Mark Williams.

Advito also today released RFP Decision Suite, a hotel procurement and management tool for facilitating the RFP negotiation cycle. The suite delivers reports to travel buyers and Advito consultants via statistical charts from the RFP negotiation process through day-to-day hotel program management.

Included in the data suite are rate benchmarking, property information and a feature that provides a global hotel solicitation list based on data including historical rates.

Other features include an RFP decision model that converts offers from individual properties into "accept-reject-revise" recommendations based on a custom scoring system. The model gives an overall cost-of-stay calculation factoring in the rate offered by a property relative to the target and the monetary value of amenities. The system also houses internal communications between buyers within a corporation's travel program. The system also provides benchmarking summaries through dashboards, which provide analysis of savings, compliance and rates on geographic levels including global region, country or city, according to Chevalier.

Additionally, the company today announced the release of an Air Contract Scorecard component, which now includes year-over-year data metrics, combined with graphical dashboards. The scorecard tool measures trends based on carrier, market, carrier savings, contract targets versus actual and Quality of Service Index information.

The benchmarking data is derived from more than 400 organizations responding to online surveys, which includes Advito's more than 200 clients, 15 percent of which are non-BCD Travel customers, according to Chevalier. Advito also expanded its benchmarking service to multiple languages. It is now available in English, German, French and Spanish.