Travel buyers were able to maintain high adoption levels for online travel booking as the economic downturn forced them to tighten policies and search for savings, according to a Business Travel News survey of 221 travel buyers.
Survey respondents reported that, on average, 68.5 percent of U.S. domestic air tickets were booked online in 2009, and more than half of respondents said their online compliance levels were in the 80 percent to 100 percent range. Similarly, the buyers reported an overall average of 62.3 percent of U.S. domestic air tickets booked without agent intervention, with just under half in the 80 percent to 100 percent range.
Those numbers are fairly consistent with what travel managers have been able to accomplish in the past several years, said Tom Wilkinson, president of TRW Travel & Expense Management in Pennington, N.J. Numbers today, however, are more meaningful, as buyers are less likely to subject compliance levels to such asterisks as excluding group travel from compliance calculations, he said.
"Most of these are pretty clean numbers," Wilkinson said. "There's growing acceptance and growing awareness and very few trips that you really can't book online."
Online booking compliance for hotels remains a bigger challenge, Wilkinson said, with hotels more tied to specific geographic needs for travelers and more reasons to book outside of policy, such as for travel to conventions using group rates.
With online booking tools fairly mature at most companies—just under two-thirds of buyers surveyed said they use them, with an additional 11 percent saying they are in the process of implementing one—buyers have been looking for ways to drive compliance even higher. The economic downturn added a new impetus with more focus on cost control and visibility of travel spending, said Simon Tam, senior vice president of product and technology for Egencia Worldwide.
"In our past experience, in-policy trip with air and hotel saves $203 per reservation," Tam said. "Those savings in a moderately sized program can add up, so it's important that we understand how to make the compliance easier."
Online booking tools also can drive savings through visual guilt, he said. Not only will travelers have a clear picture of negotiated rates when they book, travel managers can use online booking tools to establish baseline costs on booking flights to events that might fall out of standard citypairs, for example. "When other people are searching, they will try to beat the first person's cost or at least find something competitively as good," Tam said.
One route for increasing compliance is tougher mandates. Though some companies have altered policies to deny travelers full reimbursement for trips not booked through the proper channels, Tam said they still remain in the minority. "Last year, companies took a harder line, but I haven't heard of too many people taking the hardest line," he said.
Some companies have boosted compliance simply by instructing agencies not to book reservations over the phone if the trip is capable of being booked online, Wilkinson said.
Travel managers also have become savvier at monitoring pre-trip data to boost compliance, Tam said. Most don't take a heavy-handed approach, requiring all trips to be pre-approved, but they are able to notify travelers when they are booking out of policy, he said.
Because her department handles expense reporting as well as travel, Sapient global travel manager Michelle De Costa said she is able to monitor corporate card activity for purchases through such discount travel websites as Hotwire or Priceline. She then can look at the property in the global distribution system for comparison, she said.
"I routinely do that to make sure that we are getting rates that are comparable," she said. "We find many times that when you book the rate they were able to secure, it's prepaid and nonrefundable. You own this room whether you go or not, compared to a more flexible cost."
Travel managers also can use communication tools to boost compliance, whether those are tools provided by online booking tools themselves or separate third-party tools. When De Costa wants to drive travelers to a new hotel, she notifies them through Yammer, a corporate, internal version of Twitter. "It's been really successful and also has given more visibility to the program," she said.
Particularly with the rapid proliferation of mobile travel technology, travel buyers should be choosy when crafting policies on which tools travelers can use to supplement online booking, Wilkinson said. While some can drive better compliance, some also can mask out-of-policy travel decisions, he said.
"If it's been released by the booking tool, it'll route changes through the travel management company and it's easy to catch things out of policy," Wilkinson said, "but corporations should avoid tools that provide direct connection with the vendor."
This story originally appeared in the July 12, 2010, issue of Business Travel News.