After spending most of the past 12 months developing and deploying its transient online booking capabilities and refining its air program, SBC Communications Inc. of San Antonio has targeted its largely decentralized and outsourced meetings program. The company plans to transition to an environment where many small meetings are self-booked online.
SBC has plans to pilot the DirectMeetings meetings management tool offered by GetThere, which provides the company's online booking capabilities, and hopes to roll it out within the next quarter, said director of e-procurement and corporate travel Rosemarie Moskow, who is based in New Haven, Conn.
The telecommunications giant, which ranked 25th in BTN's Corporate Travel 100 issue (BTN, Aug 27), also is undergoing a comprehensive policy review by American Express Consulting and plans to enhance meeting guidelines in corporate travel policy.
Currently, SBC's internal meeting sponsors are pointed to an outside meeting supplier, Business Travel Management of Danville, Calif., to arrange and contract all meetings. There is currently no mandate that BTM be used for meeting services, Moskow said.
A more formalized meetings program, with specific types of events geared toward specialized meeting suppliers and smaller meetings handled online, will allow SBC to better capture and consolidate data and eventually lead to better negotiations, Moskow said. Currently, the company has no mechanized process in place to determine annual meeting costs or volumes outside of those booked though BTM.
"From a client satisfaction standpoint, we want to get people the right tools and vendors to get what they need," Moskow said. "It's good for sales and incentive meetings to be handled by specialists. For people who do their own meetings without other support, it will be good for them to have a tool to use."
Moskow's team last summer explored the various online meeting portals, searching for a tool that would enable actual planning, attendee management and booking online. Self-booking has been heavily integrated into SBC's corporate culture, with 51 percent of total transactions booked online in the first nine months after SBC signed with GetThere for transient services. Moskow decided on GetThere's meetings offering as well, becoming one of the company's first customers of its GTDM attendee management piece (Meetings Today, Aug. 13).
"We felt GTDM was the most comprehensive, mature service, especially with the integration with GetThere for flight booking," Moskow said. "Since our commissions and overrides have dropped, we have had to self-fund SBC's corporate travel program. The individual traveler chargeback mechanism financially incents online booking by offering an average discount of more than one-third versus offline travel fees."
SBC has delayed installation of the tool, though, as Moskow moves to first enhance SBC meeting management business process, explore meeting strategic sourcing cost reduction and increase client satisfaction opportunities, she said.
American Express has benchmarked SBC policy against 21 other transportation, utilities and communications firms and 53 companies in other industries with at least $25 million in travel and entertainment spending—SBC's 2000 U.S. booked air volume was $120 million. The company's policies demonstrated fairly high levels of ability to control traveler actions and drive compliance, as well as opportunities in policy comprehensiveness, Moskow said. "We fared better in most categories than our counterparts but there are opportunities," she said.
However, Moskow has focused on other aspects of travel management besides meetings: SBC recently implemented American Express' TicketTrax cost-recovery service, which searches airline databases for unused refundable airline tickets. "It offers us the chance," she said, "to recoup money that's just sitting out there."