Tiffany Topcik
Consulting firm The Solutionz Group hired Tiffany Topcik and Bratati Ghosh as managing directors as part of what CEO Chicke Fitzgerald termed "a relaunch of our firm," including a new focus on corporate travel request for proposals management, preferred vendor development and policy compliance support. Topcik is a former Lanyon and ABC Corporate Services executive and served as president of the Hotel Electronic Distribution Network Associationfrom 2006 to 2009. Ghosh most recently ran strategy and business development for the travel and hospitality practice at IT consulting firm TCS, and in the 1990s helped launch Worldspan's e-commerce unit. Management.travelspoke with Topcik this week about social media, opportunities in traditional travel management processes and other topics.
The Solutionz Group has been active in social media for a number of years, offering help to companies aiming to protect their brands and reputations, and bringing them awareness of what people are saying about their brands. Is that a kind of service that you would be bringing to the corporate travel segment?
Absolutely. I have joined on with Chicke as managing partner of Solutionz Media. We spent the past 12 months becoming engrained in the social media space and have been certified by different organizations as social media consultants. It is certainly not limited to travel. Corporate environments are very much in need of these reputation audits and putting together some sort of media strategy. That strategy may be that they don’t want to play, for whatever reasons they identify. But it is a vital part of everybody's distribution strategy right now, as well as engaging customers and building communities. We are seeing a paradigm shift. Companies previously would put traditional marketing messages out there--that billboard on the highway or an advertisement based on the demographics of a particular TV show. The viral community is putting content out there so your customers are interested in what you have to say. You build the community and you build interest by putting content out there that is relevant. The ability for that community to then share that content with people who are important and involved in their community ... it is a huge spider network that allows a message to quickly infiltrate groups of people and travel around the world in minutes, literally. So we're working with a lot of suppliers to put together that strategy and marketing program, build the brand, engage customers and--using hotels as an example--creating a persona and a voice that goes out there with special Twitter promotions, Facebook promotions, opportunities for discounts in restaurants, etc. That way people feel a part of your environment and have regular information about your product or service, so they are constantly thinking about it and sharing it with others. It is not just a one-time interaction. It is a constant two-way conversation that is taking place. I think it will creep into the corporate travel management side just because travelers themselves will be engaged in the social media communities, and there will be overlap with the hotels selected for preferred programs and the corporate programs that travelers will become more engaged with. It will be more relevant for travel managers to have an understanding because just as the travelers were interfacing directly with the suppliers before, it’s a new medium of communication and their travelers are paying attention to it. They need to know what is going on around them, and have the understanding and use of these tools to keep travelers more compliant and focused on the preferred relationships that the corporation has in place. It definitely will evolve. [Not paying] attention to it is like not acknowledging that mobile technology is a critical part of the future.
Where do you think some of the traditional corporate travel best practices need innovation?
The real opportunity is for companies to redefine and focus on their preferred supplier relationships--with their agency and/or suppliers. Hotel programs is an area where I have tremendous expertise--but air programs certainly are critical--in utilizing the technology so all employees follow the travel policy and [companies] are able to meet their financial objectives. So by examining not only who they are working with but also how they are working to actually deploy it into the corporate environment is a tremendous opportunity for corporate travel managers and travel agencies themselves to tighten the belt and make travel fun. Travel does not have to be challenging. There was a time when people were excited about being on the road--about the processes to actually book and work with your suppliers. That is where I see an opportunity to inject a little energy and spirit but also to be very focused in streamlining business objectives and achieving the financial goals that the company is looking to achieve.
It sounds like you're saying what's important is how you go about it, as opposed to what you are doing. Focusing on preferred supplier relationships, ensuring travel policy compliance and deploying the mission of the corporate purchasing function to the traveler is all stuff that companies have done and is not new, right?
No, it is not, but there are a lot of companies that haven't done it. They are working with providers, particularly in the RFP management tool, that they might find challenging in terms of managing through the RFP process. There is an opportunity there to help educate them and get them more engaged so they are doing the things they either have thought about or have started, but better. We provide the opportunity to reassess, and also look at things more on a strategic level.
The RFP process for lodging has always been onerous. Do you have ideas about how to simplify and attack the time-draining issues that people face?
They need to be familiar with the various tools out there. There are a lot of robust tools, and there are a lot of opportunities to automate the process and better manage the content so that your interactions with suppliers are as efficient as possible. Also, [travel agencies should consider] applying those technologies to be more efficient in the services they provide to a corporate customer, because so many agencies do perform the negotiating processes for corporations. They are facing the same challenges corporate travel managers face in some regards.
Going beyond just automating the hotel RFP process, people have questioned whether it should even be annual, and whether it has to be the way it is. Have you heard people questioning the cycle and the fundamentals of it?
Absolutely. It is a very arduous process, and a lot of it is made so complicated because the right technology tools are not out there to make it easy. But the tools are getting better every day. My vision is that one day there will be connectivity so that as hoteliers update their content there is an automatic feed to the partners that they are working with--be they travel agencies for the global consortia programs or individual corporations. That's where there is a gap that somebody needs to fill so that the content is continually in momentum and that the information that the travel agency or travel manager gets is always real-time. Maybe this is where the global distribution systems can step in. If you are able to have automatic feeds for the content, you can step away and look at the true core of the whole process, and that is the pricing and the negotiation for the value-adds. If there is a way to separate or refine that, there is a tremendous opportunity. The first person who can bring that to the marketplace certainly is going to make everybody's life more focused.