Air Scrip Saves $ For Pfizer

<H1> Air Scrip Saves $ For Pfizer</H1>By Cheryl Rosen

<B>F</B>aced with the question of how to use up to $140,000 worth of corporate Air Scrip, a New York-based travel manager and his agency account rep have found a solution: They are using it to help underwrite the cost of corporate meetings.

"We have already redeemed close to $50,000 worth of Air Scrip, and are using quite a bit more for a major meeting this month," said Philip Dunphy, travel manager at Pfizer Inc. "It's a good way to use up the coupons, and our agency, BTI Americas, is taking care of everything for us."

Issued in 1995 as the result of a class-action lawsuit against the airlines, many corporations and their agencies consider Air Scrip coupons to be more trouble than they are worth. The coupons-in denominations of $5, $10 and $25-are redeemable for up to 10 percent of the ticket, and must be individually filled out and stapled by hand to each ticket. That's a time-consuming process for agencies in an environment focused on improving efficiency and speeding up the travel booking process. And forget about the paperwork involved in getting a refund if the ticket to which the Air Scrip is attached is later canceled.

With $140,000 at stake, though, Dunphy was not about to let the opportunity to use them pass him by. So he and BTI account development director Daisy Stephenson sat down to brainstorm on how to use them most effectively. <B>

</B>One of the key concerns was the way the Air Scrip refund process works, Stephenson said. If someone purchases a ticket using Air Scrip and then cancels a leg of the trip, he or she doesn't get back the Air Scrip value of the canceled portion. Travelers who cancel an entire trip can get the coupon back, but they have to fill out a series of forms, and the Air Scrip is mailed back to the person who originally filed for the refund.

"Phil and I had visions of all this Air Scrip trickling in, a bit at a time, and we knew we didn't want to have a lot of transient travelers purchasing tickets with Air Scrip," Stephenson said. "We asked ourselves what pieces of business are more stable, where the dates are set and you have a fairly low refund rate without a lot of changes-and we came up with the meetings piece. It's a way to use up the Air Scrip in a controlled environment with minimal refunds."

The simple procedure involves Dunphy sending Air Scrip coupons in batches of $25,000 to BTI. When the supply starts to dwindle, the agency notifies Dunphy and he sends along another 1,000 coupons.

BTI, which handles Pfizer's transient travel and its group air account, provides the service, complete with monthly usage reports, at no charge.

<B>Will Save $140,000

</B>Since the program began in September, "Pfizer has used up one batch of $25,000 and is working on the next bunch," Stephenson said. At that rate, processing the entire $140,000 worth of coupons before they expire in three years should not be a problem.

In addition to sidestepping the refund issue, Dunphy said he also liked the concept of using Air Scrip for meetings for a philosophical reason: "I feel it's unfair to double-dip on our transient business with our preferred carriers, where we already have negotiated rates."

Other travel managers were less sympathetic. Peter Buchheit at Black and Decker in Towson, Md., recalled that the Scrip is a result of a lawsuit in which the airlines were charged with price collusion. "The maximum amount applicable to a ticket was not significant enough for me to consider it double-dipping," he said. "Besides, who created the situation?"

Black & Decker "earned" about $50,000 in Air Scrip and has used it all-half last year and half this year-for both transient travel and meetings by applying it to tickets on a first-come, first-serve basis, Buchheit said.

At New York-based Colgate-Palmolive, corporate travel services director Cyndi Perper confessed that she "hates those things," but is slowly using them up. "I am not at liberty to say how much we have, but whatever it is, it's too much," she said. "They are unwieldy and throw our numbers off. And refunding is impossible."<B>

</B>The agencies surely agree. "We wish those things would just go away," said BTI spokesman Bob Dirkes. He did note that one "huge customer" of BTI's managed to negotiate back his entire supply of Air Scrip with one carrier, although he thinks that arrangement was possible "only because the account was huge, and we do not believe it will be duplicated by any other corporation."

At American Express, spokeswoman Melissa Abernathy said that "you don't want to ask your agency to do what's required to use Air Scrip in the normal fashion, because it's very labor-intensive to fill out and clip all those coupons.