American Express in January will begin a broad implementation to provide clients with electronic folio data from Starwood Hotels & Resorts, the largest remaining multibrand U.S. hotel company that had yet to sign such an agreement with a corporate card supplier. Buyers who have used e-folio in their travel programs, meanwhile, are verifying the benefits touted by e-folio proponents as data availability continues to grow.
Under the terms of an agreement announced this month, Starwood will provide American Express corporate cardholders with breakdowns of spending at more than 400 Starwood properties in the United States and Canada across all brands—including St. Regis, Luxury Collection, Sheraton, Westin, Four Points by Sheraton and Le Meridien.
As Starwood's newest brands, midprice Aloft and extended stay Element, come online next year, they also will be included in the e-folio initiative, said Mary Casey, Starwood's vice president of strategic account management.
American Express hotel folio reports break out room charges and applicable taxes, food and beverage categories, including room service and hotel restaurants, business services, parking and ground transportation. A few early adopters will use the data this year with the full rollout of the data set for the beginning of 2008, said Shelle Santana, vice president of global card marketing for American Express.
"If you look at both properties and spend coverage, Starwood was a big, big need for our customers," Santana said. "We have a couple of clients who were very insistent on Starwood specifically."
Casey said Starwood already provided e-folio data to a few corporate clients through other such sources as data consolidators and already has sophisticated reporting capabilities for data visibility. The decision to provide the data through corporate cards sprung directly from further buyer interest, she said.
"We started to hear a more consistent demand coming from clients at the beginning of last year," Casey said. "We decided to raise this as a topic at the corporate advisory board, and that's when we really understood they were serious."
Starwood partnered with American Express first because it was the most demanded corporate card supplier from Starwood's advisory board, she said. The chain intends to seek e-folio agreements with other corporate card suppliers as well as e-folio availability from additional regions outside of North America, targeting the highest-demand regions first, Casey said. "We need to work through those geographies one at a time," she said.
American Express already had e-folio agreements with Marriott International, Carlson Hotels Worldwide, Choice Hotels International and Omni Hotels. Amex's Santana said that with Starwood on board, American Express now can provide e-folio data for more than 40 percent of its global corporate card spending at more than 9,000 hotels.
Other corporate card suppliers and hotel companies also have beefed up e-folio availability. In the most recent major e-folio announcement prior to Starwood's, InterContinental Hotels Group this year began providing line-expense data from more than 2,600 of its U.S. properties through MasterCard Worldwide
(BTN, Dec. 4, 2006). Visa also has agreements in place, including those with Hilton Hotels Corp. and Choice. In fact, Hilton, one of the early providers of e-folio data, now is sending out as many as 100,000 folios a day, according to managing director of business travel sales Maureen Mackey.
Global Hyatt Corp., one of the few major primarily upscale hotel companies without corporate card e-folio agreements in place, also indicated to Business Travel News that such a deal could happen soon
(BTN, May 21).As these agreements are announced, e-folio data is gaining ground among buyers who have adopted it into their programs. IBM pioneered e-folio data capabilities about 10 years ago, when it began to request the data directly from its hotels. Availability has grown steadily, Sean Logan, IBM's global hotel sourcing manager, said this summer at an educational session at the National Business Travel Association's annual conference in Boston.
"We really gained traction in 2001, and by 2002, we were receiving folio data from more than 3,000 hotels," Logan said. "Now, over 72 percent of U.S. hotels listed in IBM's directory—and it's very much a U.S.-based initiative—are submitting e-folio data."
Logan said IBM continues to explore alternatives for expanding its e-folio usage, including looking a corporate card solutions and a more global reach, which has been a challenge in part because of international privacy regulations. Not only has data usage saved time and money by automating the expense reporting process, according to Logan, but the data availability also has improved program compliance, as travelers like the ease of the reporting process.
American Express marketing director Anita Bathija said IBM's experience is not unique. American Express clients who use e-folio also have seen travelers gravitate to properties that provide it.
"Clients saw a change in travel patterns," Bathija said. "In one case, a client told us that when they started using e-folio data, they saw travelers were preferring one chain to another. Both were preferred suppliers and had similar rates, so they could attribute it to e-folio data availability."
In conjunction with the Starwood announcement, American Express also said it was adding new tools to its folio reporting at its American Express @ Work servicing site. A new room-rate analysis report provides data on actual rates and information on individual properties and cities including average, minimum and maximum room rate and which are the most popular.
Colleen Guhin, strategic sourcing manager at Phoenix-based ON Semiconductor, uses American Express e-folio reports to confirm that her travelers are using preferred hotels and that the hotels are charging negotiated rates. The spending data in the reports also have allowed her to negotiate high-speed Internet service and breakfast into the rates at some of her preferred chains, Guhin said.
When surveying travel buyers on their 2007 forecasts last year, NBTA reported slightly more than one-third of 189 respondents planned to implement e-folio data this year as part of an effort to reduce costs. Preliminary data from the survey that will inform NBTA's 2008 forecast indicated that almost 13 percent of travel managers plan to introduce e-folio data into their programs to trim costs next year, although slightly more than half are not using it and don't have immediate plans to do so. The preliminary data is based on the first 103 responses to the survey last week.
E-folio's role in negotiations also has been increasing, Amex's Bathija said. "This past year, a number of clients have been incorporating e-folio into their requests for proposals," she said. "This is factoring into their decision, as it allows them to have data control and savings."
Even so, Hilton's Mackey is not convinced that many buyers are using e-folio data to the full extent possible, and some buyers themselves remain skeptical about implementing an e-folio program. At the NBTA session, Turner Broadcasting System vice president of corporate travel services Robert McGurk said it is difficult for companies without the negotiating clout of large travel programs like IBM's. "It's easier to put a man on the moon right now than to do what you're doing here, for most companies," he said.
As hotel agreements with corporate cards become more commonplace, however, e-folio's feasibility becomes less about clout and more about the makeup of individual hotel programs. Buyers still have to determine whether e-folio availability is sufficient to be valuable to their established programs.
"Critical mass is something like the horizon," Amex's Santana said. "You can see it, but it's hard to reach it."