The platform launched last week by travel consultancy Advito
is designed to balance a hotel program management process that for many
companies has become overly geared toward sourcing, managing director April
Bridgeman told BTN Friday.
The platform, dubbed Hotel Boost and available now, offers
users educational modules, analytics dashboards, sourcing tools and access to a
community of users and Advito consultants to help build and optimize a hotel
program.
"We're going beyond sourcing to give them solutions
that will address more aspects of their hotel spend," said Bridgeman, who
also is senior vice president of Advito parent BCD Travel. "We're giving
people a self-service platform that has a lot of great functionality in it,
including the kind of analytics that a smaller or middle-sized customer who is
doing, let's say, their own program management and sourcing or using a
consultant in a really limited way typically wouldn't access."
Offered for an annual subscription fee, Hotel Boost includes
a set number of Advito consulting hours, with additional time available for a
fee, Bridgeman said. The product is geared to companies that at least lightly
manage their business travel and that have "goals and a business
plan" around their program.
The content of the platform includes modules on internal
program management.
"We provide education around best practices on a
regular basis, and it goes well beyond the topic of sourcing to cover [anything]
from sustainability, to digital marketing to drive adoption, to looking at
program performance," Bridgeman said. "And we're giving them access
to consultants and to each other to learn from, and hopefully it will fill what
I think has been a gap in the marketplace to date. When we talk hotel program
management, we're still too focused on sourcing."
Among the analytics offered in Hotel Boost are benchmarking
data to allow users "the ability … to understand how competitive their
corporate rates are against the marketplace," she said.
"We'll also be adding in very short order a rate
availability dashboard for their negotiated program so they can get a good
sense of which of the properties that are in their program are actually
performing and which are not," Bridgeman said. "We find that's
typically a gap in a lot of corporate programs. They'll negotiate deals and not
necessarily measure how well the deals are performing for them."
The platform includes a request-for-proposals tool developed
by accommodation management platform Vindow.
Bridgeman said Advito planned to offer a similar platform
focused on travel sustainability management by the end of 2024.