Beverly Heinritz
Management.travelthis week met with Beverly Heinrtiz, general manager of Sabre's GetThere corporate booking tool division, following her presentation here at Ultramar Travel's Business Travel Forum. During the seminar, PhoCusWright's Susan Steinbrink previewed upcoming research about global corporate travel, reaffirming her firm's earlier prediction that more than half of corporate travel transactions in the United States would be processed online this year. Considering this maturation of corporate online self-booking, Heinrtiz discussed what's next.
How did GetThere perform in 2007?
Our gross travel spend was more than $9.4 billion [up from $8.1 billion in 2006 and $6.3 billion in 2005] and it was also our seventh-consecutive year of 20 percent transaction growth. Our average adoption rate is 71 percent and we have a nice selection of clients in the 90 percent-plus range with 80 percent-plus touchless. What I'm proud about is that we don't just come in and install the tool. We have a process we use with clients to dig deep, sometimes to save money but other times to lay out specific programs, whether that includes ground transportation, meetings, global expansion, green travel initiatives or others. I don't think it's all about features and functions anymore.
Former GetThere executive Jeff Palmer often said it would be interesting when online adoption reached a point where customers were not only wondering how to handle what doesn't go online, but also were exploring what's next. So, what's next?
You keep redefining adoption. You can define it as how many of your transactions are offline versus online. I always ask, "When are you going to get at 130 percent adoption, with ground, meetings, online ticket exchange, etc.?" Companies don't know how much they spend on ad hoc meetings and ground. The time is really right for fully bringing meetings into the program, but it's still really surprising that it's still so unknown given how long technology has been out there.
What are the roadblocks?
The professional meeting planners plan big events and there's a lot of personal involvement in those big events, and the bulk of oversight is in those big events. But when you look at the 75 percent to 80 percent of what a company spends on meetings being in small, ad hoc meetings that are unmanaged and uncontrolled--those two groups don't intersect as often as you would think. I'm seeing, more and more, the travel managers getting meetings and events into their organizations.
It seems like meetings have been the next big thing for ten years. Where is it today?
In 2006, we had year-over year growth north of 60 percent on our DirectMeetings product. Last year, it was 43 percent. But the other number we tracked last year--with our StarCite and HelmsBriscoe relationships--was that the increase in overall meetings-related transactions was 73 percent. There are some really progressive companies right in the thick of this, and I believe it will continue.
Traditionally, corporate booking tools were not used for lodging as much as air travel. What does the attachment rate, or the percentage of bookings that have hotel as well as air, look like now?
We know these numbers both in GetThere and with Sabre. Offline, it's 28 percent to 30 percent. For GetThere, it's a bit above 50 percent. So travelers are more likely to book hotel if they are online than offline. We would like that to rise, which is why 2008 is the year of the hotel-booking path. You'll see more things happening there, evolving from bringing in the Travelocity experience. Also, there's some interesting work that a couple companies have done in mandating the use of the hotel path in the tool rather than allowing travelers to go out and about. I heard of one company recently that doesn't reimburse if you don't get outside approval [to book a hotel another way]. This has surfaced over the last couple years.