After years of clamor for detailed electronic folio data among travel buyers and increased cooperation between hoteliers and charge card providers to deliver on client requests, corporate travel managers finally are beginning to electronically accept hotel folios. According to a survey of 100 U.S. corporate travel buyers released last week by the Association of Corporate Travel Executives and MasterCard International, 13 percent said they are receiving line-item detail from their card provider and 77 percent said they plan to acquire such information in the near future. More than half of all respondents said receiving e-folio data is "very critical" for their travel programs.
"Respondents are very interested in the value of negotiating with hotels based on all their spend, not just rates," said Bill Mathis, senior vice president of member relations for MasterCard International.
ACTE also interviewed buyers from several companies that already have adopted the technology. Buyers, through those interviews and in survey results, said the main benefits of e-folio transmission are the ability to better validate the application of corporate rates, more efficiently and accurately audit, improve monitoring of policy compliance and prepopulate expense reports, which helps to make them more accurate and eliminate paper receipts.
While card feeds from most hotel transactions break out only the sum of the parts, e-folio transmission enables line-item details, in addition to the room rate and taxes, to be itemized and sent electronically to clients. Mathis said that the five most important costs itemized by e-folio data, according to survey results, are restaurant, telephone, room service, Internet access and parking fees. Corporate travel managers long have considered electronic folio the last frontier to a seamless expense-reporting process
(BTN, Aug. 25, 2003).Credit Suisse First Boston is rolling out line-item details in conjunction with card provider American Express. "The travel team has been rolling that out," said CSFB expense report manager Larry Bolsch. "They use it on the back end for analysis for vendors and itemizing expenses as they come in."
Meanwhile—like the 77 percent in the ACTE and MasterCard survey—others still are considering the prospect.
"Some of the hotel vendors have contacted our travel services just to gauge our interest," according to Nacion Colly-Triplett, expense report manager at Georgia-Pacific. "It's something worth considering—to make sure we're getting corporate rates and also for the expense report itemization. We require hotel itemization in expense reports, but have no way to force that itemization."
However, the study noted that demand for e-folio has been lower than supplier expectations, attributed to buyer reluctance while hotel supplier participation remains limited. While some buyers still have privacy concerns over such data, other barriers to use are systemic, as data coming in from various hotels is not consistent and not all electronic expense reporting systems can accept data
(BTN, Sept. 5).Furthermore, Mathis reported roughly one-half of survey respondents said e-folio data only would be valuable if it covered at least 75 percent of their hotel spend. With such major hotel chains as Hilton, Marriott and Choice Hotels International participating and others working to roll it out, that type of penetration is not unattainable, according to Dave Hillman, a consultant with Consulting Strategies.
Hotel companies increasingly view folio offerings as a competitive necessity. "It's becoming more of a deal-breaker," said a hotel executive, requesting anonymity, who works for a chain that now is in the process of putting together an e-folio data program with card companies that the chain expects to introduce by the end of the year.