Agencies Track Unused E-Tix Refunds

<B> Agencies Track Unused E-Tix Refunds</B>

By Amon Cohen and Sarah Welt

On both sides of the Atlantic, agencies are using technology to advise corporate travel buyers on which electronic tickets have been used and which have not.

BTI Hogg Robinson in the U.K. claims to have found a solution to the thorny problem of electronic ticket reclamation. It has introduced a system that tracks unused sectors and refunds to those who bought the ticket.

Coming just weeks after news of progress in the quest to introduce e-ticket interlining (<I>BTN</I>, Mar. 16), it seems that the new distribution medium finally is becoming user-friendly for corporate clients as well as airlines.

Travel managers have been complaining about the difficulty of tracing unused e-tickets almost since their introduction. "We did some quick sums and worked out that we lost about $35,000 in unused e-tickets over the last six months," said Ian Scott, divisional finance director for property and facilities management at Coopers & Lybrand. "Our travelers chop and change their flights as they move from job to job. With a physical ticket, they keep it in their briefcase if they don't use it, and when they get back to the office they remember to do something about it. With an e-ticket, human nature being what it is, they are less inclined to let us know or they forget about it all together."

Hogg Robinson will run a monthly database check to determine which unused e-tickets have not been claimed by clients. The system initially is being applied only to tickets for British Airways domestic flights, but technology director David Young said it will be extended rapidly to all e-tickets with which the system is compatible. This includes the major U.S. airlines but rules out Lufthansa.

<B>Other Agents' Solutions</B>

Meanwhile, on the U.S. side of the pond, American Express, Carlson Wagonlit and World Travel Partners also are working out solutions. American Express is beta testing its own e-ticket tracking system, Ticket TRAX, with several clients, and expects a rollout later this year.

Ticket TRAX tracks e-ticket status in the agency's electronic records to determine whether or not a segment was used after a predetermined amount of time. The system separates non-refundable and refundable unused tickets; if a ticket is refundable, the system initiates a refund process, closing open coupons and notifying the traveler that the refund process has begun. In addition, it will provide monthly MIS reports detailing which tickets have been refunded or are available for exchange.

Amex spokesperson Melissa Abernathy estimated that today, 6 percent of all e-tickets are neither used nor refunded.

Carlson Wagonlit also is working on e-ticket tracking as part of its Project Mercury company-wide reengineering and automation effort (<I>BTN</I>, April 13), according to senior vice president of sales and marketing worldwide Liliana Frigerio. Carlson Wagonlit will pilot the first Mercury travel center in the fourth quarter of 1998, Frigerio said, and certain parts of the technology are already in pilot testing.

Super regional agency WorldTravel Partners of Atlanta also is actively working on e-ticket tracking. The company has been in beta test with several Sabre clients for the past three weeks, testing a system it has built as part of its CoRRe automated quality control system. Versions for Worldspan and Apollo are also in the works.

The WTP vision is to electronically search PNRs to determine if an e-ticket has been issued. If it has, CoRRe will add a non-error segment to make the reservation stay "live" after it's been issued, said vice president of corporate services Brenda Catanesi, and drop the reservation in a queue three days after departure. Each day, the system will display ticketing remarks to determine if the ticket has been picked up. If not, clients have the option to receive an automatic CoRRe mail, or to elect to have the refunds manually processed. Ultimately, "it's in the travelers' hands or controlled by the travel manager," she said.

Scott at Cooper and Lybrand said BTI UK was charging him a set-up fee of about $1100 and an administration fee of about $25 for issuing each e-ticket as a result of introducing the reclamation service. "I estimate that will cost me $7,000 per year but with savings of $70,000 to be made, it is a no-brainer," said Scott.

"We had already tracked some of that sum, but there was a lot of aggravation involved and I had the problem of not knowing whether I had caught them all."

Whether BTI Americas adopts the technology depends in large part on the outcome of the negotiations over the U.S. agency's future ownership. Young said there was no reason technically why it could not be used outside the U.K., however. "At the moment, we just run it in the U.K., but everything we do goes into the pot for deployment in the rest of BTI," he said.

Young believes the system really will come into its own with the spread of self-service reservations. "Many of our clients are already running up considerable debts because of the inability to track e-tickets, so we are talking to many of the self-service reservation manufacturers, most of whom have not done anything to deal with the situation," said Young.

Electronic tickets still are relatively rare in the U.K. A new survey from Carlson Wagonlit Travel shows that 25 percent of travelers have used an electronic ticket, compared with 14 percent last year.