Michael Boult
Meeting technology vendor StarCite Inc. recently announced new relationships with American Express and Pegasus to further integrate and automate aspects of meeting management reconciliation and booking. StarCite CEO Michael Boult discussed with Management.travelthat integration, the status of the StarCite-OnVantage merger and ways clients are dealing with hotel pricing increases. An excerpt follows.
StarCite recently announced integration with American Express' Global Commercial Card Group. What exactly is this integration and how does it benefit corporations?
Five beta customers of ours and Amex commercial card will be the first ones to go on the product. The product is built in three phases. Phase 1 [to be] delivered in November is essentially the ability for those customers using one of the American Express Meeting Card products to download charges into the spend management area of StarCite technology. From that point, in the first phase, you'll manually allocate charges to the appropriate box to split charges. The first phase doesn't sound very exciting, but there are time savings and other benefits. Phases 2 and 3 are scheduled in 2008: March for phase 2 and July for phase 3. That's where you'll be able to apply for a card within the technology, get authorization right there and then; and download charges, but with more detail. The charges will find each other: If you anticipate a $12,000 charge for Marriott, and it comes through American Express as $12,100, it will put itself in the right category to be processed correctly. Also contemplated is before you even get the charge you can interrupt and dispute: Marriott wants to charge you $44,000 for this, you'll be able to interrupt and say, "No, this isn't right," before it's even posted. [You'll] also be able to use Amex Meeting Rewards, where if you use Hyatt and spend more than $25,000, you get a discount. You'll be able to get those electronically within the StarCite Marketplace. There are lots of things we will be doing to make the system for the planner far more useful, far more user-friendly.
StarCite also announced a relationship with Pegasus Solutions to provide real-time rates. How does that benefit planners who are contracting for group rooms to see and book transient rooms?
We don't see this as transient solution. Pegasus has an interest to get into the group space and this is a way for them to enter that space. We think of this as a new group solution, creating the process with Pegasus and its 70,000 hotels that allows those planners--some professional some occasional--to actually look at and see live availability. They can find the "book it" button within that technology, so the message within milliseconds is sent to say, "Take this out of inventory." If a hotel loads [group room into a global distribution system] and exposes this to Pegasus, they would expose the number of rooms that they are willing to give to an agency, corporation, third party, StarCite or whomever, and it would display. All those different rules can be baked into Pegasus so when the planner comes to ask for availability, they get what the hotel wants them to see. Most importantly, when a planner hits "book it," it's booked without phone calls, faxes, etc. It happens just like it's happened for 25 years on the transient side, but has yet to occur on the meeting side. The meeting rooms are not loaded, but there is a workaround. But I'm not going to tell you what it is because that's just giving my competition something they can replicate.
But the intent is to allow planners to book both sleeping and meeting rooms online from live inventory?
Meetings are different in many, many ways. For some meetings, you take a sleeping room, but intend to meet in a building you own; with others, you need meeting space, but no sleeping rooms. Sometimes we intend to stay and meet at your hotel. You have to accommodate all the different flavors. We intend to create a product that meets all of those flavors. If you don't have that solution, then you don't have a solution. This is one step in the direction to make it as efficient and as complete as both planners and suppliers want. I would say that this journey is years. This is one important step, because you've got global considerations. This is something that will get a lot of inventory online in a way that people can consume it quickly, but by far this is not the last thing we're going to do to solve this problem. It took transient [booking solution providers] many, many years to perfect it and it's going to take us just as long. We have customers using our small meetings solutions right now, but it isn't as optimal as it's going to be. Pegasus has contemplated to be operational first quarter 2008. There will be direct connects, connects via Pegasus and connections via other entities. On the hotel side, the plumbing is sometimes awkward--that's something that we have to work through with our customers.
When the StarCite merger with OnVantagewas completed at the start of this year, you said clients by year-end would migrate off the StarCite Marketplace platforms and onto the new platform, based on OnVantage technology. Where are you with all that migration, and what impact is it having on customers?
OnVantage had a product, StarCite had product and suppliers had to go to one place for this lead and another for others. Last month, we released our group lead center product. We're training about 100,000 suppliers and that will take us the better part of this year to get done properly. After they're all trained and happy and know what they're doing, we'll turn the clients loose. In October, all attendee management-only customers--users of ARM and RegWeb--will go over to the new product, MeetingView. Spend management (enterprise) clients will begin moving in November and into the first quarter of 2008.
How are your clients dealing with the limited availability and steep hotel pricing in some markets?
Segment the market into two crude groups: those people who are managing their programs, have data about their programs, have leverage and visibility and have systems that enable them to send competitive online requests for proposals to suppliers; and, the vast majority of customers who do not have those systems. Those who do not are going to enjoy the 8 percent to 10 percent increases as reported by a number of agencies. Those that do have those systems will not be impacted in the same way. They will have far greater ability because they will have agility given to them from data that they've collected from suppliers they're working with to move to alternatives, move meetings, change meetings, have meetings done far further in advance than those who have yet to invest in strategic meeting management technology. It supports the evangelism. If you want to manage this--if you want to do this sensibly and properly--there's a big return on investment. If you want to continue with business as usual, you should expect to spend more and more money. It's not that our clients are immune to the market, but they're in a far better position to control their own destiny.