<B> Web Cites</B>
By Laurie Berger
<B>Travel Buyers Set Web Strategies</B>
Tired of waiting for the industry to produce viable end-to-end systems, impatient travel managers at many companies have been rolling up their sleeves and doing the dirty work themselves.
"Companies are settling for the Buick instead of the Cadillac," lamented Chip Mahan, chief of the travel project management office at the National Security Agency and chair of the National Business Travel Association's technology committee. "Until all the capabilities and cross-platform issues are addressed, we're building our own systems in modules."
Allied Signal, for example, has been tapping third-party tech partners and internal IT gurus to accomplish its technology goals, and using "gap analysis" to evaluate various booking tools. "We have aggressive cost reduction goals--and if one product cannot do it all, we'll fill those holes with other sources," said Nader Nemati, manager of quality and technology for North America.
Content is one of those gaping holes critical to acheiving cost efficiencies. To minimize the time travelers spend on the phone, Allied Signal plans to beef up its arsenal of online trip planning data by "licensing content from third parties and creating key Web links," Nemati said. Allied Signal also plans to customize its booking product to allow group reservations for meetings. Its IT group is migrating home-grown expense reporting and management reporting packages to the Web. And the company is in discussions with vendors to integrate back-end data from a variety of supplier direct links.
Nemati is confident he'll achieve his targeted 10 percent reduction in costs this year. The management reporting and expense packages introduced three years ago already have been adopted by 83 percent of the company's business units.
Another cyberpioneer, Cisco Systems, is close to selecting a booking system after two years of searching. "The sticking point has been finding a system that synchronizes Web and CRS profiles," said travel operations manager Jennifer Loftin in San Jose. "It's our last requirement and we haven't seen it yet." The company has developed a reporting module designed to consolidate data feeds from a variety of sources, and is piloting electronic corporate card issuance and account management with American Express.
Hewlett-Packard, too, is pessimistic about finding a workable booking tool soon. "In a perfect world, we'd buy a product that was independent of both the travel agency and the CRS," said travel MIS manager Jeff Kurn. Like Allied Signal, H-P is concentrating on adding content to its intranet site to prevent travelers from straying onto the public Web. To that end, improving mapping tools is one of Kurn's top priorities. Also on tap at H-P is an effort to take control of its data. Kurn is looking at ways to download traveler profiles from Apollo to an external database. At the same time, he's trying to set up e-mail links between travelers and travel agencies to streamline communications. "Even our highest level travel agency contacts aren't on e-mail yet," he said.
Although a proactive technology strategy costs money, for the first time ever, some companies are actually laying their technology dollars on the table. "Technology companies, in particular, which already have large IT staffs, are beginning to dedicate full-time assistance for travel," said Mahan. Cisco tapped the expertise of six MIS staffers to develop and implement its expense reporting system last year. And the 1998 travel department budget includes "one person to integrate the corporate booking tool we select," Loftin said.
Travel suppliers, too, are becoming more cognizant of corporations' technology needs. Mahan said he sees more teaming, where sales reps bring a tech person along on sales calls to answer the questions of corporate travel buyers. Eventually, he predicted, those two positions will merge into one.