With large market company travel spending becoming more multinational, travel buyers in the segment are requiring more capabilities and enhanced functionality from travel technology to raise their control over travel expenditures and traveler behavior as they seek to bring consistency to increasingly complex travel footprints.
Download a PDF of the full 2009 Large Market Benchmarking Report here, including all data, charts, stories and large market buyer profiles.Online booking systems are becoming the backbones of most corporations' technology portfolios. Larger programs that have considerable expenditures in other countries are deploying online booking systems abroad. In countries where online booking tools already have been implemented, corporations are encouraging travelers to book online in an effort to shed costs without having to significantly reduce trip volume.
According to
BTN's large market travel buyer survey, 84 percent of respondents are using an online booking system in the United States, with another 11 percent planning to buy or replace their tools by 2010.
With booking compliance through the preferred company agency and self-booking tools continuing to reach new heights, more savings can be generated by improving touchless transaction rates. According to
BTN's survey, the average first-pass yield rate percentage on online U.S. air bookings has reached 70 percent. On average, a touchless reservation can save a company $10 per transaction versus an online booking with some agent interaction. Booking tools have improved in that area significantly in recent years by enabling such previously offline processes as unused ticket application and multi-leg booking to occur online.
In Europe, online booking tool penetration among these U.S.- based large market buyers is less overwhelming, with only 40 percent of respondents currently using a self-booking tool. Meanwhile, 30 percent have no plans to buy one.
"Internationally, booking tools have matured to the point where you can use them in most countries," said Travelocity Business vice president of sales and account management DeAnne Dale. "Once you have a consistent booking tool across the globe, you can set some controls within that tool by country or region on what and how travelers are buying."
With even a slight increase in online adoption, companies can save considerable sums of money through traveler visual guilt, better policy messaging and the most straight-line savings method of paying less in transaction fees for an online booking. Large market companies on average pay $11.50 per touchless online air transaction, while for air reservations made with an agent they pay $30.70, according to
BTN research.
Estée Lauder in 2009 increased its online booking adoption in the United States from about 50 percent to nearly 80 percent after issuing a company directive that all domestic point-to-point roundtrips be booked on the company's preferred self-booking tool, Concur Cliqbook, according to executive director of global travel and meeting services Cynthia Shumate.
The company now is measuring the adoption of each of its brands, and those still at low adoption levels will receive new training. Communications with data points on lost savings also will be sent to non-compliant travelers in an effort to shift bookings online.
Shumate also is evaluating expanding the online booking tool program in Europe, used currently in three of its eight operating countries in the region. She noted that the company has good adoption numbers in Australia.
While size of the program has some role to play in online booking tool strategies, technology company executives said it has a lot more to do with the company's travel patterns, where its offices are located and how its travel management service providers are configured.
"A lot of times, the issues are the same," said Concur Cliqbook Travel solutions marketing manager and former large market travel buyer Suzanne Fletcher. "They may be more complex because they may be global or multi-agency and multi-GDS, but oftentimes you still have a lot of the same issues."
Pam Keenan Fritz, senior vice president of North America for Egencia, which breaks the market into three segments-less than $2 million in annual air volume, $2 million to $15 million in air and more than $15 million-said that with any supplier or technology, "a good business practice for a $1 million account is a good practice for a $50 million account."
One area where large market companies are showing some differentiation is the way in which they contract their online booking tool relationship. Whereas the midmarket often buys self-booking tool services through travel management companies, larger companies are increasing their direct relationships with vendors.
GetThere chief marketing officer Suzanne Neufang said that this year in particular procurement, finance and technology teams are looking for more "core expertise from their technology providers, so there is more interest in direct relationships."
Rearden Commerce, which identifies the large market as its sweet spot, according to vice president of worldwide sales Tony D'Astolfo, is starting to do more direct contracts with large market companies at the lower end of the scale.
"As the program grows, that is where you start putting some emphasis on it and that is when you get into dealing directly with the supplier," said D'Astolfo. "The way the Web has changed, the way technology is innovating and the impact that mobile is having should all inform your technology decisions."
Concur's Fletcher said questions of whether to contract directly with the online booking system provider or go through the travel management company is less an evaluation of size and more a question of "do you have the resources to manage it and do you want your primary contact to be your technology company or your TMC?"
Accompanying online booking tool expansion in the large market is the requirement for more robust data and more sophisticated reporting and analytical tools so buyers can have greater visibility into their total travel programs as they work on increasing compliance and reducing spending in all company locations. With business intelligence tools becoming more mature, they become more of decision-making applications than just reporting platforms, something that has added value for travel buyers now tasked with several other corporate services or procurement functions.
"What you are seeing in the larger market accounts now is that they are not dedicated travel managers, they are assigned other responsibilities, which could include corporate mobility," according to Advito general manager Mary Ellen George. "The role of the travel manager is expanding and getting them engaged more to make their trips more productive and their travelers more productive."
Travelocity Business currently is rolling out two new dashboards designed for enhanced evaluation of compliance metrics in order to enable travel managers to have more influence over traveler behaviors by providing more granular visibility into compliance metrics.
"The key is to have the hierarchy built in to look at behavior across the globe by region or country," Dale said. "They are getting more scientific at looking at behavior in different places of the world and how they push different behaviors."