RFP Cos. Add Integration For '07 Bids

RFP Express, Lodging Logistics and Uversa International are modifying their hotel procurement process tools to provide a more automated, integrated solution for corporate travel buyers and hoteliers in time for the 2007 bid season. Designed to allow buyers to concentrate on negotiations rather than the mechanical minutiae accompanying the corporate hotel procurement process, the new enhancements strive to provide end-to-end automated support.

Additionally, the National Business Travel Association hotel committee recently devised two new modules in its request-for-proposals template for 2007. The new template, which the third-party RFP vendors have said they will follow, allows buyers to integrate meetings specifications into the transient RFP process.

The first module is in two parts. One focuses on the hotels' meeting facilities, including the total number of meeting rooms available, and the second focuses on client rate information and client amenity and room information. Travel managers can include questions premised on these modules in their bid documents and base their hotel program decisions on hotel responses to the questions.

Ensuring the consistency of the RFP process is necessary for a successful procurement process, said Sam Schisler, co-chair of the NBTA hotel committee and global hotel program manager for clothing manufacturer Limited Brands Inc.

"The NBTA hotel committee realizes the value and importance of getting the correct stakeholders to help deliver what the hotel industry wants regarding the RFP," he said.

RFP Express, a hotel program automation company based in San Diego that services both the hotel and corporate client sides, tailors its tool to keep up with the changes put forth by the NBTA.

"Our main initiatives are to support the NBTA 2007 format changes and remove the manual intervention that is required in the process," according to Gary Rectenwald, president of RFP Express. "We are concentrating on electronic uploads in an attempt to remove all the manual processes that are involved with the RFP process, including: manual uploads for prices and negotiations, RFP responses, and property profiling."

Rectenwald also said that new to RFP Express for 2007 would be a hotel compliance audit tool. "After RFPs are completed and directories are loaded, we have a service that goes back on a weekly basis and works with corporate travel managers to ensure that their hotels are being booked and whether the rate they are getting is above, at or below the negotiated rate. This exception reporting is something they can go back and take immediate action on."

Seamlessly interweaving the process is the aim of Colville, Wash.-based Lodging Logistics and its ProLodgic tool that Jennifer Granskog, vice president of business development, said will provide customers a front-end to back-end—and all points in between—solution. Above all, Granskog said that the tool would be able to efficiently keep tabs on which hotels successfully had loaded the agreed upon, negotiated rates on the global distribution systems—an important aspect of a hotel program, which only works if rates are published on the GDSs.

"We've taken the GDS audit tool and integrated it back into the RFP tools," said Granskog. "At the end of negotiations when you do the audit, instead of getting results back showing that 20 percent of hotels still haven't loaded the global distribution system codes, it's actually going to show you the distinct properties that have or have not loaded. Customers will be able to see if a certain property loaded its rates early in January or not until May. It's going to really start affecting how travel managers make their decisions about which hotels are accepted into their hotel programs, and it's not going to just be about rates and amenities—it's going to be about available rates and making those rates available in the GDSs." Granskog said that the tool was being beta tested on customers and would be available for the upcoming bid season.

Uversa International, a Reston, Va.-based company that provides technology for the business travel industry, partnered with two companies to develop its tool that will be in place for the 2007 bid season. Uversa is employing the services of StarCite, a purveyor of online meeting planning services, and Fare Audit Inc., which specializes in travel audit services, to create its fully integrated tool, RFP Runner, which addresses all stages of the hotel procurement process.

"We're integrating those services so that our clients can not only do their transient hotel bid process, but by using StarCite for their meeting planning, can integrate the total spend into reports where they can see the overall picture of their spend," according to Jo Ann Baynes, president of Uversa International.

"On the back end of that, once they have completed their program, we work with Fare Audit to audit every record that is booked through their agency or online booking tool and that information will also appear in Uversa for those clients," Baynes said. "By using all three companies, customers will be able to see what they chose for their transient program, their meeting planning needs and then they'll be able to audit all their booked hotels to see if their rates are loaded."

Baynes added that by combining meetings and transient spending, buyers would have more leverage during negotiations. Uversa's tool still is in the development stage, but demonstrations have been done for clients and Baynes said it would be available for the upcoming bid season.

Robert Steiner, who is director of procurement for Fair Isaac Corp. and was the original creator and president of RFP Express—though he is no longer affiliated with the company, except as a customer— is leery about the back-end capabilities of the different hotel procurement tools.

"The tools are quite adept as far as doing the solicitation, getting RFPs out and responses back, and formalizing the agreements," Steiner said. "The audit part is more difficult because you have to get access to the global distribution systems. Hoteliers do like the tools because it expedites their processes, but as far as the tools go, with regard to integration into property management systems and audit tools, they still have a long way to go."