The Art Of Rolling Out And Upping Usage Of New Tech

<B>The Art Of Rolling Out And Upping Usage Of New Tech</B>

By Cheryl Rosen

Rolling out travel technology is a complicated affair, and it needs to be treated like any other project. For the best results, it's wise to have a dedicated project manager--even if not a full-time one--to keep an eye on the ball.

That's the advice of Linda Watson, travel manager at human resources consulting firm Hewitt Associates LLC, a $21 million air volume account that last week expanded its pilot of the GetThere.com online booking system to a full-scale global rollout, beginning in the United States and Canada. Watson was the featured speaker at one of the eight stops of a travel technology road show GetThere.com is putting on around the country this month and next. Each program also features a speaker from Business Travel News and consultants Bob Lichtman and Bob Langsfeld.

At Hewitt Associates, Watson's pilot group of frequent travelers and their travel arrangers clocked a 20 percent adoption rate and shaved 3 percent off the company's average domestic ticket price of $511. Watson said the company's goal in rolling out the technology was to reduce costs, increase use of preferred suppliers, increase the accountability of regional management through better data reporting and grow her relationship with McCord Travel, the company's preferred supplier.

Watson suggested that a travel technology project manager take minutes at meetings, set agendas and monitor commitments, and schedule weekly meetings to "make sure everyone is delivering on their piece, or to see what the delay is, just as you would manage any project."

Hewitt Associates was the customer profile of the day at the road show stop in Chicago. In Dallas, Texas Instruments travel technologies manager Melissa Lopez said her 2000 goal is to push usage of the more mature TI online booking program from its current 26 percent to about 35 percent; to increase the usage of lowest logical airfare from 89 percent to 95 percent; and to increase the advance purchase of tickets (more than a week out) to 75 percent.

To push up usage, Lopez is analyzing TI's top city pairs and singling out routes where online booking is particularly low. On the well-traveled Dallas-Houston route, for example, she has found that only 26 percent of TI travelers are booking online. The volume on that one route is so high that "if we target just that group, we'll reach 50 percent usage companywide for the year," she said.

Lopez also shared some lessons learned at TI, where Colleen Guhin (see story) in 1996 signed on the bottom line to make the company GetThere's first large-scale corporate customer (<I>BTN,</I> Oct. 28, 1996). Had TI the chance to do it all again, Lopez said, she'd enlist higher-level management support earlier on, rather than "taking a bottom-up approach," and communicate the benefits of the program more clearly to that group. Instead of focusing on selling the system to travelers, she'd also focus from the beginning on travel arrangers, identifying how their needs differ from those of the traveler and communicating more with them. She'd also be careful not to "underscope the issue of PNR finishing" and the integration required to fully automate the quality control of reservations.

Still, not all the surprises have been learning experiences, Lopez noted. While the travel office has marketed the GetThere system only to travelers in the United States, "we're seeing hotel and car rental bookings from TI employees coming to Dallas from all over the world, and that's not something we had anticipated," she said. About 10 percent of hotel and car rental bookings are coming in from overseas locations that have not been officially included in the online booking program.

Meanwhile, Lichtman and Langsfeld suggested using a three-year ROI when presenting a financial case for online booking systems to senior management, "in synch with the life of the project."

GetThere's Ray Gabano said the online booking system is about to conquer a long-standing issue, the inability to book Southwest Airlines (<I>BTN,</I> Nov. 15, 1999). "We've tried for years to work with Southwest," Gabano said, but the carrier stood by its policy of holding down distribution costs by participating only in Sabre. GetThere by summer will debut "a method of booking Southwest through Sabre, and for non-Sabre customers we'll add a second GDS connection that will be so seamless the traveler absolutely will not know this is going on," Gabano said. The system also by summer will allow United Airlines frequent flyers to upgrade their seats online.

GetThere partner Sprint PCS, meanwhile, is rolling out MobileManager, which will allow users to book travel over their cell phones (see story). By year-end, the system also will recognize travelers from GetThere's corporate accounts and apply their individual travel policies.