General Electric is moving as much as possible of its European travel budget, which includes roughly $70 million spent on air, to a new Carlson Wagonlit Travel electronic service center in Warsaw, Poland, where the default form of reservation is both electronic and in English.
CWT positioned the multinational center—now handling the fulfillment process sans ticketing for GE employees based in Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Switzerland and the United Kingdom—as distinct from those announced in the past by competitors because of its emphasis on electronic reservations.
"It's not for everybody," said one CWT executive, noting the Warsaw center really is designed for multinational corporations that have fairly harmonious travel policies across European borders and self-booking usage in the 30th percentile or higher.
At General Electric, the movement follows notification in February to U.S. travelers that they are required to use the company booking tool for all simple and point-to-point domestic and international reservations—with the exception of rail and low-cost carrier bookings, some of which can be booked on those providers' sites.
The CWT center, which it calls the eCenter, partly is based on the model in GE's Phoenix offices, according to officials. There, fulfillment services helped GE become one of the largest users of the Sabre BTS booking tool. GE recently told vendors it would move to the new GetThere platform from Sabre BTS, a migration that GetThere has begun with a number of clients
(BTN, April 28).GE also took a page from the multinational consolidation to Sabre products, including the GetThere booking tool, by Cisco Systems. Other companies, such as Interpublic with the KDS Corporate tool, are seeking to use the same self-booking product across continents. Still others, notably Siemens, use different booking tools in different nations.
U.K.-based GE European travel manager Keith Mullineux said that, initially, determining what to do in Europe was problematic following the success of BTS in the United States. "We had a mixture of Amadeus and Galileo, so I started looking at various self-booking tools that had a multi-GDS capacity," he said. "In the meantime, Sabre bought GetThere. It soon became obvious that the smart thing to do was to go with GetThere because that was something we would be adopting in the U.S., U.K. and Benelux anyway because they were going to stop supporting BTS and promote GetThere." As a result, the GetThere tool was implemented in Germany in 2001 and in France last year.
"I immediately got a lot of early adopters piling in," Mullineux said. "Some of them found the site before I even announced it." Yet, adoption was sticking at around 15 percent or "18 percent on a good day. We were just about to start on Spain, and I thought it was going to be a real slog around Europe. Meanwhile, the States were thumping the table saying, 'We need to digitalize all our services, and travel is dragging its heels.' So, we made the decision in summer 2002 that we would adopt Sabre throughout Europe."
Having settled the front end, GE turned to fulfillment, as efficiencies there are key to expanding the benefits of online booking. "To generate savings, it's not enough to procure an online booking tool," Mullineux said. "You have to use that tool intelligently." He started by having CWT turn down simple bookings, providing agents with a polite script to read. "We had to be brutal and told the agent we were not going to pay them for doing simple stuff. When people realized the agent wouldn't do the simple things, the adoption rate jumped up to 45 percent in the U.K. and Benelux and 28 percent in France and Germany."
Since opening the eCenter, GE's adoption rose further still. "On a good day in Germany, we achieve 65 percent adoption," Mullineux said. "The U.K. stands at 50 percent, France at 40 percent and Switzerland at 30 percent."
Adoption of the tool cut GE's European transaction costs by 30 percent and short-haul fares—which are about 80 percent of the total—by 11 percent, Mullineux said. "We make it very difficult for travelers to take anything but the lowest fare. If they try to book it, a message comes up saying, 'Do you really want to do this?' If they want the quiet life, they take the lowest fare or they may have to explain to someone. They can't hide behind the excuse that the agent never told them." Mullineux said GE is reluctant to offer choices of reasons for travelers breaking from policy because that, in a way, authorizes the exceptions.
Assuming half of reservations through the eCenter are initiated with a self-booking tool, CWT said, using it will save clients an additional 20 percent. At GE, Mullineux is looking for even more.
With a staff of 60, CWT's new eCenter eventually will replace 19 national travel centers now in use by GE's more than 20,000 European travelers who take roughly 135,000 trips per year. Following a soft launch in late February, the eCenter is an option for about 70 percent of GE's needs in Europe.
The movement across borders picked up momentum last October when American Express opened two European fulfillment centers for its interactive bookings
(BTN, Oct. 28, 2002). One center in Stockholm, Sweden, services its customers in Scandinavia and the Netherlands, while the other at Sophia Antipolis near Nice, France, services customers located in France, Germany, Belgium, Spain and Italy.
As it departs from CWT for European travel management, IBM has begun moving some of its regional travel services to Amex's Nice-area location, prompting GE officials to wonder as recently as January why CWT had not developed a similar concept. "No agency has been particularly visionary on this," Mullineux said.
CWT executive vice president for EMEA Liliana Frigerio criticized the Amex-IBM operation. "In Nice, it's all on the phone because IBM has no self-booking tool in Europe," she said. "They just created a national call center elsewhere, basically moving the same job out of the big cities."
The eCenter "is not about pulling out of a national call center and servicing it on an offshore location, which is cheaper," Frigerio said. "That's been the simplistic thinking that has gone around pan-European call centers of late. We have enlarged our service configurations and are adding the eCenter as an alternative. We're not trying to replicate services you get from the local national call center."
One distinction between the eCenter and some pan-regional service centers under development by mega agencies
(BTN, Feb. 10) is its focus on English, partly to avoid the costs of multilingual specialists.
"In countries that used to use national travel centers, we had discussions about the change with travelers, for example through workers' councils," Mullineux said. "It went much more smoothly than anticipated, even among the French and Germans. After all, we are an American company so people are traveling to places where they will tend to speak English."
According to Frigerio, many travelers for whom English is a second language still can initiate reservations requests using a formatted e-mail or, of course, the self-booking tool. "If both the traveler and the agent are looking at the same screen, then you don't have to be an English professor," she said, noting that multilingual agents can demand a salary premium of up to 25 percent. "Obviously we're choosing a site that gives us a good labor force to pick from, but we're off the phone by default."
Frigerio also described proprietary CWT customer relationship management technology that uses a number punched in by the traveler to produce a pop-up window on the agent's screen that includes a profile and other specifics including past usage and needs. She said the eCenter is geared to handle multiple GDSs and self-booking tools, and it uses file-finishing software from Navigant's Aqua Software Products division, as well as a proprietary CWT back-office system. Air and rail ticketing, however, is queued to the national level because of International Air Transport Association restrictions on cross-border ticketing.
Reflecting a long-term partnership between CWT and GE, the former used GE's Six Sigma quality-assurance methods in transferring the transnational corporation to the eCenter. "We did a service quality survey before they were moved, according to certain criteria and standards," Frigerio said, noting CWT uses Six Sigma in most of its worldwide operations. "The same will happen after they're completely moved in, around November, so we can measure how efficiently it is versus the service they are getting on the local and national levels."
Meanwhile, she said, "We have a list of five clients in the process of evaluating how far along in the steps they are. It's more a question of when than if."
Mullineux said CWT has been successful in picking up other accounts in the national centers where GE is downsizing, reducing the burden on GE of covering redundant operations.