ACTE Backs Hotel RFP Form

<H1>ACTE Backs Hotel RFP Form</H1>By David Meyer

<I>Madrid </I>- The Association of Corporate Travel Executives has joined the effort to promote a standard format for providing hotel pricing and other information to streamline and automate the annual RFP process.

This year, the standards have for the first time made it possible for business travel buyers to go through the tender process electronically with most major hotel chains in the United States, and so far dozens of companies are taking advantage of the opportunity. Gaining ACTE's support is the first step toward launching the program internationally.

ACTE's endorsement of the standard, developed by the National Business Travel Association and the Hotel Electronic Distribution Network Association (<I>BTN</I>, Feb. 12), came during an educational session at the ACTE Global conference here last week. That session included presentations on the components of the 437-item long form, the 200-item short form and the results they have produced so far, both for hotels and for two of the first corporate buyers to have used them.

Jeffrey Kurn, corporate travel MIS manager for Hewlett-Packard, and Patricia Shelton, DuPont Conoco travel and meetings supervisor, said the standard had enabled them to begin automating the hotel RFP process, reducing errors, saving time and cutting costs by at least one-third.

Kurn said that once all hotel companies have adopted the RFP format-enabling a fully electronic process-H-P can cut in half the $150,000 it spends on administering 1,100 RFPs for its worldwide hotel volume of more than $200 million. That cost estimate, he said, is based largely on the dramatic reduction in time and the improvement in accuracy that Kurn has observed in using the standards over the past 18 months. Loading RFP information into his database has gone from taking days or weeks to taking 10 minutes, he said.

Shelton said she expects the electronic process to save one-third of the $55,000 she now spends on the hotel RFP process. While the software application her company has developed is not as slick as the one developed by H-P, it took only one MIS person two weeks to develop that application. Shelton stressed that the benefits of the standard format are "more than monetary," noting that it enables much faster turnaround of RFPs by cutting her data entry time from four to two weeks and dramatically cutting rework costs. It also speeds the process of loading her hotel rates into the CRS.

Tom Lackney, executive vice president of Business Travel International, said his company is advising its top 50 to 100 accounts that the standard RFP can save them 22 percent of their RFP processing costs now and 40 percent when all hotel companies adopt the process.

Hoteliers who have implemented the standard also have seen their costs drop sharply. Dan Geller, ITT Sheraton's director of national corporate travel sales, who moderated the ACTE discussion, said the standard had cut the cost of an RFI and RFP at his company from an average of $1,000 to $200.

Debbie Meekin, Marriott director of sales strategy, said that where it used to take 40 minutes of data entry for each proposal, it now takes 30 seconds, driving per-proposal costs down from $600 to $100 last year. Of the 120 bids the chain will price centrally each year, 60 clients are using the standard form and 10 of them are doing it electronically.

And it's not just the largest companies that are using the form. Annual volumes of companies using the standard ranges from 25,000 to 1 million room nights. The five largest agencies also are using the standard format, Meekin said.

Meekin said the standards effort started four years ago when 10 corporate buyers and Marriott started worked with NBTA for the 1993 bid cycle. It has since grown among buyers and hoteliers alike because it not only reduces costs, but eliminates aggravation, overhead and unnecessary delays, she said.

Meekin, who serves on the NBTA Hotel Committee, said NBTA, ACTE and HEDNA are working out details on how to gather feedback so that they can enhance the standard form for the 1998 RFP cycle. The groups aim to complete that effort by February.

ACTE president Earl Foster, corporate travel operations manager for Hewlett-Packard, said he had no qualms about jumping on the other associations' bandwagon in endorsing the standard. "It doesn't have to be invented here," he said. "It's like the computer business-there has to be portability. We want to see this standard adopted across the entire worldwide industry."

Foster said the NBTA hotel committee had asked him for ACTE's endorsement during the NBTA convention in Dallas. Foster has since joined with NBTA president Judie Shyman and HEDNA president Flo Lugli in issuing a letter to all of their members expressing their solidarity in seeking "100 percent acceptance by the travel community" for the format for comprehensive hotel pricing collection and delivery.