Avion: Prism Data Use By Corporate Clients Grows In Europe

Fifteen of the largest corporate travel spenders, half based in Europe, have implemented Prism's seven-year-old Avion air data and contract management tool, and five of them have done so in the past two years.

Prism vice president of Europe, the Middle East and Africa Herman Mensink said half of Avion subscribers now are European-based corporations, including Dutch manufacturing conglomerate Akso Nobel, ING Group, Philips Electronics and Royal Dutch Shell.

Launched in 2001 and billed as an advanced global air program management tool for companies with more than $40 million in worldwide air volume, Avion is a hosted application services provider platform built as a direct counterpart to Prism's SalesServer airline data tool. In concept, Avion is supposed to deliver comparable booked data to corporate travel buyers, thus eliminating discrepancies at negotiation time.

In addition to providing three handfuls of some of the largest business travel buyers with its cleansed airline booking data, Prism continues to develop the product's ability to manage complicated air portfolios and serve as the basis of air negotiations. Avion recently added CO2 emissions reports that account for aircraft type and age and takeoff and landing cycles, a reporting element of particular importance to European corporate travel buyers who are required to report their programs' sustainability metrics.

Prism also is developing Avion's mapping capabilities to provide interactive views of market and citypair performance, Mensink said.

Such contract-analysis tools as Avion often carry a substantial upfront cost, an investment some users said is outweighed by the returns from accurate decision support and performance evaluation with more precise, clean and timely reports, and keeping the request-for-proposals process in-house.

Amsterdam-based ING Group recently consolidated six countries and E40 million of its European travel program using Prism and is preparing to use Avion's air contract management tool, according to ING manager of European business travel Jeroen van Hek.

"Until now, I just used the output to get performance figures on routes, but now we are loading up our European contracts and I am just experimenting," he said. "The key value is that they have the historical data, but if you look at the potential savings you can achieve each year, you have to define three areas: negotiated savings from published rates, procured savings, which is based on whether travelers actually used those negotiated savings, and cost avoidance."

Added van Hek, "It's a cost reduction compared with using an external consultancy each year to do our air program. Prism is pretty expensive in that there is a fee per segment, but you offset that cost toward potential savings because you have such a good instrument to steer your volume. It's not all about the volume, but your ability to steer in the right direction. If you are not able to steer, even a lot of volume won't give you discounts anyway."

Philips Electronics several years ago consolidated its global air program using Prism, and Avion has enabled the company to drill deeper into reports for more relevant business-unit and country-to-country benchmarking and a clearer picture of the company's volume-commitment performance, according to Philips director of strategic sourcing for airlines and corporate card Peter Sijbers.

Some travel managers at times have questioned Prism's data, seeing a conflict of interest due to the fact that Prism's biggest customers are the airlines. Sijbers and van Hek recognized these concerns, but said the issue is a nonstarter as their data has proven clean and accurate. "For one thing, the airlines accept the data from Prism as the truth and they don't accept the agencies' data," van Hek said.

Sijbers added, "Prism is the reality, and that's the basis for your discussion whether it's right or wrong." The U.S. carriers' position is "no Prism, no contract," he said. "You can question whether you put Prism into a distinct and powerful position because quite a number of airlines use the airline data side to manage their contract portfolio. On the other hand, you don't have discussion about sales and flow and fluctuation of volumes."