Richard Wooten
With an annual U.S. air travel budget of about $210 million, Lockheed Martin in June announced the selection of Travelocity Businessto handle its travel program that supports 80,000 frequent travelers worldwide. The five-year deal dispelled the notion that travel management companies born in the consumer Internet travel world can handle only small or midsize corporate accounts. Management.travelspoke last week with Lockheed Martin corporate travel services director Richard Wooten.
As far as the implementation and conversion plan, how much of the global program would be covered by the new agreement, and at what stages?
We're going to convert over in September this year in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom. All the European Union countries on the euro will go in September. The largest percentage of our volume is in the U.S., and the largest outside the U.S. is the U.K.--and it's not huge. The rest of the world is probably about equal to the U.K. We have presence globally, but the majority of employees are American expatriates on long- or short-term assignments. The Asia-Pacific countries are currently using BCD Travel offices on short-term agreements that would carry us through until Travelocity moves into their facilities now called Zuji [Travelocity's consumer online travel company in Asia]. That would happen in the middle of next year, after they set up Zuji to handle corporate travel. They want to be sure they are consistent on the back office, and that all the data are flowing properly.
Changing travel management companies is pretty sensitive. Do you have protections against reduced service levels during the transition?
We do have protections in our current agreement with TQ3Navigant and I will say that, going into this, I was a bit nervous. But I don't need to be. They have stepped up to the plate and are living up to the service-level agreements.
One of the differentiating pieces of the Lockheed travel program was very strong integration with the TMC for some of the safety and security elements, including a relationship with iJet Intelligent Risk Systems. Is there a difference in how Travelocity Business would work with iJet compared with how you have worked with iJet in the past?
Actually, it will be different. In the past, we had three or four business units contracting directly with iJet for risk management services. Last September, when we started this process, we decided we wanted to use iJet enterprise-wide, for domestic and international travel, and the direction we wanted to go was a "pay as you go" [concept], so it was really built into the agency fees. That way it's not a huge number, and it gets spread out, which is good for us because projects get charged correctly. It makes things a lot easier and more accurate on the accounting side.
What had Lockheed previously achieved in terms of its online booking program?
Right now, we're at about 86 percent and it has kind of hit a peak. We're not seeing a huge increase each month. I'm hoping that with Travelocity and the familiarity people have with it for their personal travel, we can increase it. The Travelocity Business interface has more functionality turned on than what we have had with the GetThere tool. For example, the ability to upgrade on American and United. The other thing we're looking forward to is the ability to exchange tickets online. Those are things that our travelers repeatedly tell us they want.
What do you think it means for such a large account to go with what some see as a newfangled competitor?
We're starting to see the "iTMCs" mature to the point that they understand their model has to be flexible enough to cover some unique service requirements for corporations. One of the factors that helped us was recognizing the amount of investment in their information technology, with tens of millions spent each year on IT. My personal view is that you'll see more TMCs investing more heavily on the IT side.