CWT Rolls Out Hotel Booking Tool In The U.K.
Carlson Wagonlit Travel has followed up on its strategic pledge to increase hotel management activity by launching an online accommodation booking tool in the United Kingdom. There are plans to roll out CWT Room Select in more European markets once it has been converted into other languages and currencies.
CWT Room Select offers several features that, claimed U.K. director of industry affairs Nigel Turner, tackle the challenges of hotel program management in a way general online booking tools struggle to match because they principally were designed to sell airline seats. It sources content from global distribution systems and CWT's proprietary hotel database, Harp, as well as from direct-connect links, including one from a U.K. budget hotel chain.
In addition, the tool can be programmed to search as a priority for a client's negotiated room allocations while taking into consideration blackout periods. Different room types and rates, including meal plans, can be loaded for the allocated properties.
Clients also can program in city rate caps, so that no properties are displayed which exceed the policy maximum for that location. Ninety-seven percent of the properties on CWT Room Select have been geo-coded to enable more accurate searching of locations and allow travelers to find the nearest hotel to any given location, such as an office.
"Other booking tools often search hotels by city or even the nearest airport, because they are from the airline world," said Turner. "This gives travelers the ability to search in the locations they really want."
Turner said CWT intends to launch an additional feature this autumn that will help clients secure last-room availability on negotiated rates, even when those rates have been shut out by a hotel's yield management system.
If a traveler attempts to book a preferred hotel at the negotiated rate and the GDS reports the property is full, the tool automatically would check whether the client has an LRA agreement. If there is, it would interrogate the GDS once more to see whether the same hotel has any rooms available at any price. If this too should prove to be the case, the tool would generate a message to the property advising that there is availability and therefore the client is entitled to book it at the negotiated rate.
CWT has launched its hotel booking tool in the United Kingdom because it is generally regarded as the most advanced market in Europe, if not worldwide, owing to the high marketshare of specialist hotel booking agencies. Several of these have sophisticated online reservation tools that they have developed themselves and clients often prefer using them than the hotel element of general corporate travel booking tools.
"The U.K. is a much more competitive market and rates of booking automation are higher," said Turner. CWT said it handled £215 million of U.K. hotel bookings in 2008, which it claimed was higher than any hotel booking agency.
Turner added that CWT Room Select was extensively tested with one unnamed client, which he said achieved a 40 percent adoption rate for the tool in the first week.