"I know why it's happening," ITW director of global travel and expense services Cathy Sharpe said about the manufacturing company's decline in channel compliance for hotel bookings, from 67 percent two years ago to 40 percent now. "There are so many opportunities out there, and you've got young travelers, who investigate everything. They want to do what's best for the company, best for their budgets and best for themselves from a service standpoint."
Sharpe reports to ITW procurement. "If I have $7 million hanging out there that I'm suddenly not bringing to the table, it's a problem," she said. As part of her pilot of Concur's TripLink tool to capture off-channel bookings, she sent focused communications to rogue travelers about what the company saw in their hotel-bookings patterns and told them that they needed to link back to the program via TripLink.
Making the decision to accept and embrace off-channel bookings easier, Sharpe discovered that rogue travelers were actually getting cost benefits for the company from their behavior. "I was shocked," she said, and as the pilot progressed, she witnessed additional benefits cascading to travelers who were booking outside the program, in fact, she said, the benefits start with the booking experience itself.
"The problem with corporate online booking tools is that as good as they may try to be, they are never going to pull in the content that the supplier offers [direct]. Suppliers are putting so many resources into building the apps and the check-ins and all the glorified experience a traveler has when they are in the world of that particular supplier."
Sharpe's new visibility also has called in question the conventional wisdom that corporate travelers get better and more consistent service from negotiated contracts. Instead, she has found that ITW travelers who book direct on supplier websites consistently get the benefits of loyalty status but don't get bumped for last room availability.
Even with the benefits, Sharpe doesn't actively promote the program, at least not yet. But she has to have a mechanism to show the whole value of her hotel volume and "close the gap in what I don't know that I don't know."