ACTE, NBTA Demand Hotel Folio Data Feed

<H1> ACTE, NBTA Demand Hotel Folio Data Feed</H1>By David Meyer

The National Business Travel Association and the Association of Corporate Travel Executives are combining forces to respond to age-old corporate buyer cries for hotel portfolio spending data-information that has become even more essential as businesses move to automate expense reporting.

The two primary associations of business travel buyers and suppliers, the 1,800-member NBTA and the 1,300-member ACTE, are forming a joint task force to develop a standard that hoteliers and corporate card vendors can use to electronically report individual charges for meals, lodging and other categories.

Creating an automated format for expense accounting purposes is a vital element of the end-to-end travel management solutions that corporations, travel agencies and software companies are developing.

ACTE and NBTA are now sending out invitations to several top travel managers from both associations, as well as appropriate representatives of hotel and payment systems vendors and third-party providers of expense reporting systems, for a first meeting of interested parties in the next several weeks. The associations are encouraging all interested vendors to call either organization's headquarters to secure an invitation.

Vendors who participate in the effort to develop a universal reporting standard will have a competitive advantage in the marketplace by being the early adopters, said ACTE president Earl Foster and NBTA president Judie Shyman in an exclusive interview with <I>BTN</I> to announce the joint effort. While technically, the creation of the standard involves work by both payment systems vendors and hotels, the most complex part of the process is to get buy-in from a critical mass of hoteliers. ACTE and NBTA are hoping that their combined leverage will drive suppliers to comply.

"In the future, corporate travel managers will see this as one of the decision factors in selecting a hotel," said Foster, who is corporate travel operations manager for Hewlett-Packard.

"What we really have to work on is to have the hotels develop their systems along with the credit card companies so that we as travel managers can get the breakout of hotel spending," said Shyman, travel manager at Hazeltine Corp. "When the hotels are negotiating with travel managers, they'll often ask how much is spent on hotel rooms versus food or meetings."

The association presidents said the point is to have precise data for negotiations and internal accounting, not to weed out movie rentals or minibar charges, as many hoteliers fear. "The goal is not to clamp down on charges at all, but to give us information we need to manage the travel function," Shyman said.

Foster said initial feedback from vendors has been positive. "When Judie and I have talked this up with individual suppliers, they have expressed a lot of interest in doing this," he said. "And they've needed somebody like our two organizations coming together to take ownership and say, 'we'll sponsor it; let's get it going.' They've tried to do it on their own, but I'm not sure that either the payment systems or the hotel companies thought it was a priority yet with corporate travel managers, so it has never gotten done."

"We've been talking about it, and saying that it's important and that we need it, but we haven't acted on it," Shyman agreed. "And if vendors are really paying attention to the customer, then we have to let customers know it."

Foster said the need for this data has become even more acute with the advance of automated travel systems.

"As Judie's company and my company move toward an expense management system, the data that we get from a charge card company is inadequate," he said. "With folio data, we will be able to pre-populate expense management systems and go directly into the general ledger in the format that our companies need. We want to take feeds directly from the charge card company and hotel, edit out the personal items, add in the out-of-pocket expenses and on it goes."

For hotels to provide this data will require them to alter their back-room systems so they can hand off the appropriate data. Charge card companies also will have to modify their data collection fields.

Like the effort to standardize the hotel RFP process that both associations are now committed to (<I>BTN</I>, Sept. 16), the task force will develop a format that it will then beta test, most likely among its own members.

"Once the standard is developed," Foster said, "we will educate our members and get them to tell their suppliers it is what they want, just like the hotel RFP."

The NBTA and ACTE leaders expect the first meeting, which will probably be held in a central location such as Chicago, to include a fairly large number of people and concentrate on determining who will participate in creating the standard.

Shyman and Foster have appointed as co-chairs of the joint association task force Norma Rohrbach, Citibank vice president, global airline program, who has been active on NBTA's automation committee for several years, and ACTE member Gary DiVincenzo, manager of corporate transportation for Rhone Poulenc Rorer. In addition to facilitating all the interaction of the task force, they will, through their respective organizations, invite corporate travel managers to join the task force.

"We need a group of travel managers who understand the automated expense management systems and what companies are looking for from folio data," Foster said, noting that few companies have been working on the back-end processing of the bills.

While Foster admitted his goal of getting the major chains on board in six months is aggressive, he said, "we need something coming out of this effort in the next several months because all of our companies are pushing us on this. We're consolidating payment centers, we're automating the processes, and travelers are saying, 'you're putting all the work on me when you do that.' Companies are saying, 'hey, travel managers, fix that process for them.