TI Opens ITN Booking To Travelers

<I>Dallas</I> - In another step forward for the online travel distribution channel, Texas Instruments this month moved into a full rollout of the Internet Travel Network booking system, and became the second ITN customer to put an electronic system on the desktops of thousands of travelers.

After seven months of development and testing that eventually included 500 users, the Texas Instruments TravelChoice system on June 10 rolled out to all 13,000 holders of the company's corporate card. In its first week, it attracted 1,900 travelers who booked 10 to 12 tickets a day, said corporate travel manager Colleen Guhin.

Feedback has been positive, she said. Travelers report that after the initial learning curve, they can book a simple roundtrip air ticket with a hotel and car in about three minutes--so fast that "if they were on the phone with a travel agent, they'd still be talking about the weather," Guhin said. While she has not yet formally tracked average fares, she has noticed that travelers are accepting low-fare tickets offered by the system with greater frequency than when a human agent offers similar options.

Guhin said the company hopes by the end of the year to see 30 percent of its U.S.-based air, hotel and car-rental bookings made online. That volume in 1995 added up to $62 million worth of air tickets and a whopping total T&E tab of $111 million, according to the Corporate Travel 100 (BTN, July 15, 1996). And those numbers are expected to increase significantly in 1997 and 1998, following TI's acquisition of Raytheon Co.'s defense division and Sterling Software's software business.

The rollout makes Texas Instruments ITN's largest corporate customer, with a slim lead over the World Bank, a $70-million air-volume account that began offering online booking to 11,000 travelers in May (BTN, May 19). Like the World Bank, Texas Instruments will use a service-bureau model in which the system physically resides on a server at ITN headquarters in Palo Alto, Calif., which travelers will access through a private corporate intranet.

Guhin said she expects TravelChoice to improve compliance with all of the company's preferred travel vendors, but believes that will be especially true in the hotel arena. Now, only about 60 percent of TI's hotel bookings are made through American Express, the company's designated travel agency; the remaining 40 percent are booked direct by travelers.

Unlike some companies considering online booking options (see story, Page 12), Guhin does not plan to offer incentives of any kind to travelers to encourage use of the system. "It's against our policy to incentivize travelers to do what they are supposed to do in the first place," she said. "The incentive is the savings in time for the traveler and the savings in money for Texas Instruments."

Regarding Amex's efforts to roll out an automated booking system with Microsoft, she said, "ITN is the best supplier right now, and we would like to keep them. Suppliers have to stay competitive and state of the art, but at the same time there has to be a good reason to change."

ITN, the first vendor of a working Web-based booking system for the corporate market, seems determined to stay competitive as the big players--including Sabre and Worldspan--begin to deliver systems of their own. ITN is working on enhancements for the "next version" of TravelChoice, including a travel arranger feature that will let one person make and track bookings for many travelers.

"Down the road a little farther" is the possibility of using the Internet to bypass the CRSs and go directly into hotel databases over the Thisco switch (BTN, Nov. 25, 1996), Guhin said. Direct connections to TI's preferred car-rental suppliers also would be "relatively easy to do," though she doubts suppliers will be able to handle direct connections in 1997.

Given that "putting corporate travel policy into programming language is a real challenge, and implementations always take longer than you think they will," Guhin is pleased with TI's progress down the uncertain road to electronic distribution.

One remaining concern is the state of online commissions, which some carriers have yet to clearly define for the corporate audience. "Some of the airlines have said their online commission cap does not apply to the corporate market and some have said they are still working out the details," Guhin said. "But after we have come this far, a change in commissions is not going to change our direction.