Carlson Wagonlit Travel has rebranded its year-old, distribution-focused
hotel division as RoomIt by CWT. CWT president of hotels Scott Brennan said the
division is working more like an outsourced tech startup than a travel
management company division and that it will deliver aggregated and sorted
hotel content to any booking tool. As such, RoomIt can work with any tool
chosen by a CWT client—such as Concur, KDS or CWT To Go—noted Brennan. The
company is in beta programs with Concur, Amadeus Cytric Travel & Expense and
others. CWT plans for RoomIt to be deployed with the top five booking tools by
the end of the year. RoomIt also is launching its own booking app.
RoomIt's primary function, for now, is as a content aggregation
service that will broaden content choice but also personalize those choices to
increase hotel attachment rates, which hang at 60 percent across CWT. "For
every hotel, we'll hit multiple aggregators; we'll have GDS content, we may
have a direct relationship with the brand and we'll have our own unique content
that we've negotiated," said Brennan.
To sort through the vast quantity of rates, RoomIt operates on
artificial intelligence-powered algorithms that sort content based on corporate
preferred relationships, traveler preferences, previous booking patterns and
other priorities. The sorting exercise will be performed upon search but before
pushing content out to third-party booking tools. That's an important piece of
the functionality, said CWT president and CEO Kurt Ekert. "The shopping
request goes against our XML interface. … We'll send the response to say, 'Here
is the sort order in which you should show it.' They have to make small changes
to the user interface … but our XML interface not only governs the shopping
response but also the sorting display of the content. The algorithm is the same
regardless of the derivation of the shopping request."
CWT noted that RoomIt will enable traveler reminders through
e-mail or an app that will provide one-click booking for itineraries that do
not already include a hotel. It also will give the corporate client the option
to reward travelers for attaching the hotel booking—either with hotel loyalty
points or other loyalty mechanisms like gift cards. Brennan said early data
indicates that the Loyalty Booster can help drive attachment, but clients can
take or leave that option based on their program strategies.
Focus on the Midmarket
From RoomIt, CWT has carved out a unique function that will
serve the small and midmarket as a hotel-only booking tool. "CWT is functioning as the TMC, and we are effectively
outsourcing the hotel operations and servicing to RoomIt. Once we've done that,
we have a fully dedicated hotel team and technology staff that enables us to
pivot. Maybe we don't need our customers to be our TMC customers at all. Maybe
we can have just RoomIt customers. … We can go into the [small and midsize
enterprise] space with a hotel-only product … where we can easily demonstrate savings
for companies spending $1 million a year on hotels."
Brennan framed the booking tool
as an offering for companies that don't already have TMCs or online booking
tools. "We thought it was important to give them that avenue to be able to
book hotels in the way that a larger company would, with the full breadth of
content, multiple aggregators, CWT unique content and then the traditional GDS
and direct-from-hotel content that a large company would get through CWT,"
Brennan said.
CWT
has dedicated 150 people to the RoomIt team and will grow the division.