Interview: Lanyon Chief Commercial Officer Mike Boult

Lanyon recently received a patent on its process for auditing hotel rates and availability, approved without restrictions by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Lanyon chief commercial officer Mike Boult this month spoke with BTN's Michael B. Baker about why Lanyon sought the patent and what it intends to do now that it has been rewarded.

Why did Lanyon pursue this patent?

The primary motivation is to protect innovation. There are others in the market that seem satisfied with providing very basic capabilities and not investing on innovation, where we are wholly focused on investment in innovation. When you do that, it's always good practice, if you believe what you are doing is groundbreaking or deserves to be recognized, to seek that patent protection.

What are your plans now that you have the patent?

Certainly, we're not looking to be vultures. Lanyon's not a company like some others that are set up to be litigious. There are some interesting stories the last couple of months, with Microsoft buying AOL's patents and Google buying patents. Those are the guys that trade patents based upon the litigious nature of their business and industry. It's like an arms race; they stock up on patents so they stop each other from suing each other indiscriminately. That's not our position. Our position is to protect our intellectual property and assets and make sure someone who does want to emulate what we've done has to pay us a license to do that. Our ambition is not to drag people into court.

Will you evaluate travel management companies, global distribution systems and other parties that provide rate auditing services to determine whether they are violating your patent?

We will. There are fewer and fewer. More and more agencies and entities have licensed our technology, so the number of independent providers has been shrinking. I can't think of any megas that don't use Lanyon for this activity. There are some other folks that claim or suggest that they do certain things, and we'll take a look at what they're up to.

Your patent mentions screen-scraping methods of rate auditing. How does Lanyon's method compare?

For many years, the approach was a screen-scraping approach. You basically have a program that goes into a particular GDS or multiple GDSs and tries to make a hotel reservation—an availability request, almost. The information you take from the green screen is what's being used to judge whether there are errors and what kind of errors there are. The green screen provides one very basic set of data, and it's not always reliable. What we do is use the GDS as a conduit, a communication vehicle, via web services, not over green-screen requests. We go straight into the hotel central reservations system, the place where the rates are or are not loaded. We're not relying on information that comes in from the green-screen approach. The amount of information we get back is very rich. We're taking XML data, which has 10 times the information a green screen can produce, so we can find out all sorts of intelligence around what hotels are or are not doing around corporate rates, which you could never derive from the screen-scraping approach. It's far quicker. We can process thousands of hotels in an hour, while the green-screen approach takes potentially days to motor through the information. But it's more to do with the richness of the content you get back. We can see, for instance, that a hotel has placed a length-of-stay restriction. We can see not only that there's a problem, but we also can determine what the problem is. We've been providing this solution for buyers and suppliers. The supplier side has a need to monitor themselves, to make sure that their processes are efficient and accurate, so we think that this is fundamentally different. We're trying to solve problems, not point fingers. We're trying to help buyers and suppliers get what they both want: clean, efficient and accurate information.

American Express also has a patent on rate auditing technology. Is the screen-scraping approach used in that patent?

It is.

Sometimes the patent process can take several years. How long did it take for Lanyon?

It happened pretty quickly, about a year. They issued it unconditionally, so they couldn't find any evidence or anything else that would prevent them from issuing the patent.

What other patents does Lanyon currently have?

We don't have any other patents. We're definitely exploring, as we continue to innovate, other things that we are doing that potentially could afford some kind of intellectual property protection. It's something we're exploring with our patent attorneys.

This interview was originally published by The Beat.