Online booking vendors are responding to corporate travel manager demand by redesigning their tools to encourage the inclusion of hotel reservations when travelers book air tickets.
For a variety of reasons, including limits on their ease of use, online hotel bookings have lagged behind online air bookings. Hotel features in online booking tools are "still rotten," said Cindy Heston, manager of worldwide corporate travel for Thomson Corp. in Indianapolis. Heston, an online booking early adopter, does not even expect her travelers to use Thomson's tool for hotels.
To address such concerns, E-Travel, GetThere and TRX, among others, are attempting to foster consideration of the whole trip, rather than just air, by streamlining navigation and adding content. Without booking all the components of the trip together, buyers have been paying extra transaction fees.
GetThere's latest release of its booking tool
(BTN, April 28) asks travelers upfront if they need a hotel along with air and car. For the first time, it views the trip as a single entity, rather than separate decisions regarding air, hotel and car. "In effect, it forces the user down a certain path," said Tony D'Astolfo, vice president of sales. "Once they make the air reservation—in instances where it makes sense, given the duration of the trip—it then reminds them they need a hotel." In setting up the tool's parameters, travel managers have the option of alerting travelers at this point that they are in violation of policy.
The new approach is more linear and, therefore, more time efficient. "We wanted to keep travelers, having booked their air, from having to cycle back to an itinerary review page before being able to book hotel and then again before booking car," said Jay Gabany, GetThere director of product marketing.
TRX's ResX booking tool, introduced in February, also features an "all-in-one" introductory screen to capture hotel bookings. Likewise, the tool gives travel managers more power behind the scenes.
"For the first time, we're including hotel rates that are not necessarily in the global distribution systems," said Steve Reynolds, TRX chief technology officer. "We're going to Internet sites that might have inventory and rates that are better than what's usually provided by the travel agency. Yet, travel managers can policy control it."
According to Reynolds, buyers can determine which rates the traveler will see. "Do travel managers want to stay with the traditional route, meaning the GDS, or do they want to take a more risky route via the Web?" he asked.
The rise of Internet rates that undercut negotiated rates has become a pressing issue for buyers
(BTN, April 28). "Web rates are coming out that are better than negotiated rates by a higher percentage," Reynolds said. "ResX allows buyers to pick which Web sites they want the system to search. They may say no to merchant model sites, but yes to branded hotel company sites. Then they can policy control the rates that come back."
Consequently, when the rates are better than GDS rates, buyers can decide whether or not to display them. "They can show them only if the savings are over a pre-set threshold or only show them to certain individuals," he said.
Speed of the tool also is crucial to making the hotel booking, which typically takes longer than the air booking simply because of the numerous hotel options. "The traveler should be able to get from beginning to end in less than 30 seconds," Reynolds said. "Speed is really what drives adoption. If the tool is fast, intuitive and easy to use, people are going to use it, whether the company mandates its use or not. If travelers have to wait, they're going to get impatient."
Meanwhile, the latest update of Amadeus' E-Travel tool, introduced late last year, focused on mapping capabilities to help travelers be sure they are selecting the approved hotel most convenient to their business appointments. "We build in not only each client's preferred hotels, but the key locations in each destination that company travelers have to visit," said Matthew Hausmann, E-Travel vice president of marketing and business development. "This way, travelers know they're in the best location, which can be a big time saver."
With online booking, travel managers run the risk of incurring multiple transaction fees if the air, hotel and car portions of the trip are booked separately. "You want to encourage travelers to book a whole passenger name record because of the cost implications," said Arlette Nakhjavan, vice president of interactive travel at American Express. "While it's easy in an off-line environment for travelers to call an agent for their air booking and subsequently add a hotel or car booking, online these can be separate transactions, if the traveler isn't careful."
Hausmann recommended that travelers be sure to add the additional reservations to the existing PNR.
Buyers need to be aware of the cost implications here. "If you're not analyzing your quarterly profit and loss statements sufficiently, you can be in some dangerous territory here and not even realize it," said Peter Harrison, vice president of consulting for GetThere.
Even before the advent of online booking systems, the rate of hotel reservations made through the travel agent lagged behind air. "Only about one-third of hotel volume was being booked through the agency channel," said Mark Walton, principal with Consulting Strategies in Lincolnshire, Ill. "So even at that time, companies were losing about two-thirds of that potential opportunity."
"Hotel is a struggle for us," said Silver Spring, Md.-basedDiscovery Communications' director of global travel services Yukari Sison, who cited online adoption rates for air at her company at more than 70 percent. "We really need to get to the point where we see this level of compliance with hotel." Sison said travelers who do not use the online tool to make hotel reservations are required to provide a reason. "Frequently, travelers on assignment have hotels booked for them by contacts in the destination," she said. "Either that or they've gone outside policy and found a cheaper Web rate not available on our system."
Because the need for a hotel booking often gets overlooked, Eric Peter, manager of travel services at Merck & Co. in Whitehouse Station, N.J., has customized the company's booking tool accordingly. "We place online messages at the top of the product with this point in mind to make sure it gets travelers' attention," he said.
As there typically are more hotel than air options in a destination, travelers are likely to have more questions. By having the travel agency assume responsibility for the help desk, hotel online booking adoption rates should improve because agents are equipped to address these questions. "It's a service improvement for users," said Cathy Corts, travel manager for Bausch & Lomb in Rochester, N.Y. "Plus, the agents train new employees, so they'll be accustomed to booking hotel from the onset."
Reasons vary for travelers' reluctance to book hotels along with air. As Sison pointed out, many leave reserving a hotel to the people they are visiting who know the local destination and might have preferences of their own.
"The secretary or travel arranger at this location also might be in an incentive program to steer reservations to a certain property," GetThere's Gabany said. "At travel agencies, booking a hotel was something else an agent had to remember to ask about after completing the air booking. Typically, other calls were coming in, the agent felt stressed and the question about the hotel booking got overlooked."
While online tools overall expedite the booking process, making the hotel reservation can be time consuming, relative to the air booking. " It can require more work and part of that has to do with limitations in the GDS," Nakhjavan said. "The way you locate a hotel in some of the booking tools today can be a problem. Plus, users often are at a loss when it comes to what they're looking for in individual properties, if the preferred hotel is not available, if the room class is sold out, etc."