American Express Business Travel has negotiated with hotel properties and meeting venues the ability to reserve meeting space and rooms online without completing an instant purchase as part of its exclusive agreement with meetings management technology provider Worktopia announced last week.
While the Amex-Worktopia Small Meetings Expert tool has been in the works for several months
(BTNonline, Jan. 30), Worktopia's "hold" technology had yet to be implemented as part of its existing system because of the commercial agreements required with hotel companies and meeting venues to allow such an action to occur.
"The biggest thing we heard from companies when we launched it is that the application did not allow a meeting planner to put on hold a meeting," American Express vice president and general manager of global business partnerships, advisory services and meetings solutions Hervé Sedky told
BTN yesterday at the Association of Corporate Travel Executives' Global Education Conference in Washington, D.C. "You had to go on the application and make an instant purchase. The type of buyer that this application really targets, which is mostly non-professional meeting planners, typically administrators, assistants, training managers or other mangers that want to have staff meetings."
The tool is designed for group bookings of less than 50 attendees to procure guest rooms, venue space, food and beverage and audiovisual equipment.
"They are using a couple of features that we have that we haven't put into the marketplace for business reasons", Worktopia CEO John Arenas said. "One of those is the ability to hold a reservation until the next day. It requires a significant negotiating leverage with the hotel for them to agree to the hold. We don't have the marketing muscle as American Express, so we didn't have the ability to negotiate that with hotels."
With hold capabilities in play, if a meeting needed to be cancelled or significantly altered within a certain period of time, much like an airline ticket, "the user can in effect book it and walk away," Arenas said.
Other TMCs and Worktopia distribution partners are prohibited from using the hold feature for a period of time that neither Arenas nor American Express would disclose.
"We have other travel management companies that we aren't restricted in any way," according to Arenas. "There are certain ones we've agreed to certain things on."
American Express applied the hold capability to the Worktopia-Amex Small Meetings Expert platform following the launch a testing period with about seven clients, said Sedky.