Several travel management companies and online booking tool providers are in varying stages of readiness to facilitate corporate travel donations for the Massivegood program. Officially launched last week for corporate travel channels, Massivegoodis designed to collect "micro-contributions" from travelers when they book airline flights, hotel stays or car rentals as part of the effort to fight HIV/AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis, and generally improve maternal and child health in the developing world.
Corporations can donate through lump sum payments, per travel transaction by travelers and/or matching donations when those travelers contribute. Marathon Oil became the first organization to donate following the corporate travel launch. A spokesman confirmed the company contributed $50,000--representing a $2 donation for each of its 25,000 business travel bookings completed in a typical year.
Developed by the Millennium Foundation, Massivegood first was announced in September 2009and became available in leisure travel channels in March 2010. The corporate travel implementation coincides with a global Massivegood rollout; the program now is up and running in the United States and Spain, with Austria, Germany, Switzerland and the United Kingdom expected to follow this year, and dozens more in 2011.
TMC 'Responsibility'
American Express Business Travel, BCD Travel and Carlson Wagonlit Travel have pledged their support. According to officials from each of the three TMCs, the companies will work with corporate booking tool providers to present donation opportunities for all interested clients; track contributions should clients choose to match individual employee donations; and generally promote the program across their Web sites and customer portfolios.
"It will be our responsibility to evaluate the Massivegood movement and determine whether it fits within the corporate social responsibility program of commercial clients and how a corporation should enable contributions," said CWT military and government markets president Kelly Kuhn. "A customer with a well-defined CSR program combined with high online adoption would be an ideal candidate."
CWT in seven countries added a link to the Massivegood donation page on electronic itineraries and e-tickets issued to travelers, and clients can ask for the link to be added to their CWT portals. Such options soon will be available in the United States, and Kuhn added that CWT "around August 1" plans to begin discussing Massivegood with U.S. clients through its sales and account management teams.
Referring to Amex, BCD and CWT, BCD Travel Americas president Danny Hood said, "The big three have about 90 million transactions and over half are online. That is a lot of transactions we are talking about, so adoption rates are going to be key."
Booking Tools
No corporate online booking provider has yet announced that donations have been made possible through its tools, but some are reporting progress. "The challenge," according to CWT's Kuhn, "is that many companies measure and monitor the efficiency of their booking process very carefully; entering steps into the process can be somewhat negatively received. So the booking engines like GetThere and e-Travel are very conscious of what their commercial customers want to do in that process." For that reason, booking tool providers are focused on inserting donation opportunities at or after check out rather than throughout the booking path.
Organizations using the Amadeus e-Travel Management corporate booking system should have the option to switch on donation capabilities "in the July timeframe," according to senior product manager Linda Wade-Gardner. "We are going to make it easy for site administrators to activate the ability to donate."
For GetThere's customers, online donation capabilities "are coming," said Sabre Travel Network senior vice president Chris Kroeger. "We have created enabling technologies that allow the corporation or TMC to make some decisions. They can message all throughout the [booking] path, they can have the link [to the Massivegood donation page] take place as early as possible in that particular path. What we have found is that most people want to do a bit of messaging and don't want to interfere with the booking path, but, at the right point in time, offer to that particular traveler the opportunity to donate. There is a lot of flexibility in how we build this out, and it will allow corporations and TMCs to decide just how aggressive they want to be in supporting Massivegood. Some will choose to be very aggressive and others will be a little more passive, but still supportive."
Millennium Foundation materials also noted that Rearden Commerce and Concur "are in discussions or development to incorporate" Massivegood into their corporate booking tools.
"We were approached by Amex to engage with Massivegood to build a little interface on [American Express-Rearden booking tool] Axiom to allow for contributions to be made electronically," according to Rearden Commerce vice president of worldwide sales Tony D'Astolfo. "I cannot represent that we have started development or made this a priority, but we remain interested and engaged, and await more feedback and discussion."
Concur provided no information for this article.
"Because Concur and Rearden are not enabled to do this yet, Charles [Petruccelli, American Express Global Travel Services president] and I talked about getting our IT departments together to put the capability on our portals" and enable travelers to link to the donation page, said BCD Travel's Hood. At CWT, where such portal functionality already is available, "It is something we are happy to collaborate on," said Kuhn. "It's the right thing to do."
Offline bookings
One thing the TMCs are not keen to do--at least not initially--is bring donation opportunities to offline, agent-assisted transactions, which would require agent training and prompt lengthier calls.
"Our first priority has been in the online environment," according to American Express Business Travel vice president of public affairs and communications Alicia Tillman. She added that "we have agreements with our customers about the length of our call times" that could further complicate donations in offline channels.
BCD's Hood said that for traditional telephonic transactions, the agency theoretically could send the Massivegood link and promotion within automated email confirmations, "with approval from each corporation."
As agencies and their clients mull donations via agent-assisted calls, Sabre Travel Network is working to enable such functionality in corporate agency desktops, "the way we have with our leisure agency desktop, where they can launch out into the Massivegood platform and accept donations," Kroeger explained.
Registering And Tracking
Organizations interested in contributing to Massivegood can register at the program's Web site, create corporate profiles, obtain corporate IDs to be used by travelers and define their methods of participation (corporate lump sum, individual traveler donations and/or company matching).
Amadeus, which built for Millennium Foundation the Massivegood donation engine, also is developing the program's "corporate donation management solution," according to Jolene Iredale, senior manager for the Amadeus Selling Platform. "It will enable corporations to track, monitor and manage their employees' donations and their corporate donations, and set up donation methodology."
Related resource: Massivegood