About 1,500 Marriott International properties in the United States and Canada in April will begin to electronically transmit line-item folio details to some MasterCard International corporate clients under an agreement announced last month.
"The pilot is underway with 12 accounts and the number is growing," said Randy Mayer, Marriott e-folio program director. The five participating Marriott brands are Marriott Hotels & Resorts, Renaissance Hotels & Resorts, JW Marriott Hotels & Resorts, Courtyard by Marriott and Residence Inn.
Cleaning supplies company JohnsonDiversey and financial services giant JPMorgan Chase—which also is an issuer of MasterCard commercial cards—are among those companies accepting the data as part of the pilot program.
MasterCard senior vice president of corporate payment solutions Steve Abrams said the Marriott agreement has been a long time coming and expects additional agreements to follow. He said the systems on both the card and hotel sides are in working order, and corporate bankcard issuers Citibank, GE Corporate Payment Services, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo are among the first MasterCard partners to pass the Marriott data to corporate customers.
Once the folio program is launched next month, Abrams said, the data would not automatically be fed to all MasterCard users unless corporate clients specifically request the data through their bank issuer.
"The way we have been managing this segment, and this goes for all the properties, is we provide the data for our issuers as they request it relative to specific corporate customers," Abrams said. "That's the desire of our members."
While former electronic processes broke out only the sum of the parts, e-folio transmission enables such line-item details as restaurant, room service, telephone and business center charges, in addition to the room rate and taxes, to be itemized and sent electronically to client expense reporting systems or MasterCard's proprietary reporting tool. Corporate travel managers long have considered electronic folio the last frontier to a seamless expense reporting process
(BTN, Aug. 25, 2003)."Providing enhanced hotel folio data serves the bottom-line, expense management needs of our financial institutions' corporate customers," Abrams said. "With the addition of 1,500 of Marriott's properties to the MasterCard portfolio of enabled hoteliers, corporations will find it easier than ever to manage MasterCard corporate card spending, ensure T&E policy compliance and integrate expense reporting with their existing accounting systems."
Marriott joins such other hotel chains as Carlson Hospitality, Choice Hotels International and Hilton Hotels Corp. in enabling the data transfer via MasterCard. The addition of the chain brings to more than 7,000 the number of hotels that transmit electronic hotel folio data via MasterCard.
Both MasterCard and Marriott said they would continue to bolster their respective folio programs, as the payment provider anticipates more hotel chains to follow and the hotel giant expects to bring more of its properties on board.
"Our goal is to continue to add to the folio program over time," MasterCard's Abrams said. "With Marriott on board, it gives us 40 percent coverage in our current transactions, which I would say is critical mass."
"The intention is eventually to have it available at all worldwide brands, including Ritz-Carlton," Marriott senior vice president of global sales David Townshend said. "We wanted to start with those brands that tend to receive large quantities of business travel midweek and tend to garner the lion's share of a corporate customer's business."
Marriott transmits the data daily. It then goes through MasterCard into the account's expense management system in real time. "Travel managers would access their expense management system, as they always have, but now they will see reporting on the new deeper level of detail," said Debbie Meekin, director of business solutions.
Sturtevant, Wis.-based JohnsonDiversey has been successful in loading transactional data through Outtask's Vinnet expense system and has been in the vanguard of using folio data through its corporate card program
(BTN, Nov. 8, 2004). JohnsonDiversey accounts payable supervisor of non-inventory payables Brenda Jackson said the Marriott data is coming through during the company's pilot. "So far, so good," Jackson said.
In addition to expense management prepopulation, most issuing banks offer their clients reporting tools, so travel managers can more easily access their data. These reports now provide more accurate and detailed data. Included is the actual name of the hotel where the charges were incurred. "Buyers will be better able to identify the hotel," Marriott's Mayer said. "Sometimes, reports have given the name of the corporate entity that owns the hotel instead. This has been a huge frustration for buyers."
Travelers still have the opportunity to identify certain expenses as nonreimbursable. "We're sending the same data as charged to the traveler's room folio," Marriott's Townshend said. "Each company has its own policies about how it receives the data and how travelers expense certain charges."
Yet, even as strides continue to be made on the folio front, any meaningful, widespread acceptance could be years away. While MasterCard and Visa U.S.A. have in recent years aggressively added folio partnerships, American Express—the dominant payment provider in the corporate landscape—has yet to announce specifics of its folio initiative.
"E-folio is something I'd absolutely like to see," said Colleen Guhin, strategic sourcing manager for travel and telecommunications for ON Semiconductor in Phoenix. "We've been pushing American Express pretty heavily to continue down the path. It makes sense for the credit card companies to act as an intermediary because that's where we get all our data. If it doesn't come with the credit card data, it doesn't do me any good."
Travel managers for years have clamored for the electronic transmission of transactional hotel data, yet the evolution of e-folio has been slow. In recent years, however, corporations, card providers, hotels and expense reporting companies have stepped up cooperation to realize what has often been considered a holy grail in the industry. "There are three large parties that needed to be aligned to develop the capability to meet the needs of corporate customers: hoteliers, credit card companies and expense management systems," Townshend said. "To varying degrees, there was the ability to transmit and receive, but there wasn't critical mass. It's now well on its way."
Abrams said once hotels transmit the data, they first go into MasterCard's global data repository, after which the data can be viewed on MasterCard's online reporting systems Smart Data Online or Smart Express. Abrams said if customers do not use its proprietary reporting platforms, MasterCard has relationships with the dominant expense reporting companies also to transmit data, including Concur Technologies, Geac, Gelco, Necho Systems, Oracle, Outtask and SAP.
While all the major expense systems have said they are able to accept electronic folio via charge card feeds, some said the flow of data has not yet reached the desired efficiencies. "We can load folio data," said Gelco vice president of marketing solutions Jeff Cronin. "The challenge we have is that the data come separately from the financial transactions. Also, there's typically been a five- to seven-day lag between the arrival of folio data and the actual charge card."
Cronin said that hotel folio data has not yet reached the sophistication or ease of use as seen in the purchasing card market. "The great success in the purchasing card market was to load the individual purchasing records with the financial transaction," he said. "Until we get there with folio data, it may be difficult to make use of."
Yet, many in the industry agree that, as the evolution of e-folio continues, more efficiencies, partners and penetration will follow. "The technology is not really the difficulty," Abrams said of transmitting folio data. "It takes awhile to get the hotels under contract. As more hotels sign on, it becomes more of a competitive issue. We're feeling that more hotels want to participate."