Avis Debuts Interactive Car Rental Data

<B>Avis Debuts Interactive Car Rental Data</B>

By Lynn Woods

With the introduction of its new online product Avis Interactive, Avis Group Inc. in December became the first car rental company to provide its corporate accounts with a means to break out real-time, in-depth data on their car rental spend.

"Travel managers can develop ad-hoc reporting on their desktops and, by hitting a few buttons, generate the data they want," said Kirby Bonds, Avis director of sales development. In the past, travel managers could sort data by revenue, transaction and location, but now they can slice and dice their spend using 54 different fields, including traveler name, car class, daily rate, city, duration, cost center and corporate card number. They also can do comparative analyses on their historical spend, since Avis has loaded as much as two and a half years of corporate spend data into the system.

Avis implemented Avis Interactive aggregate reporting, an electronic method of providing the data already available on paper, a year and a half ago. The significant features of the new product--the ability to drill down in detail--came with the implementation of phase two late last year.

"We're seeing customers use the product to establish rental patterns for specific cities," said Bonds. Besides being able to track travelers' rentals and find out if they're in compliance, Avis Interactive also lets clients determine whether, for example, if the company has a lot of one-day rentals in a particular city, it'd be cheaper for employees to take a cab or limo service. But isn't that just the type of information the rental companies don't want their clients to access?

"Our customer base is more intelligent about our business," responded Bonds. "If we can provide information and partner with them, the long-term value for us is being a good consultant resource to them." Such a resource, added Tom Byrnes, Avis senior vice president of sales, gives Avis a competitive edge.

In the past, Avis provided data to its corporate accounts in paper format, which essentially was an all or nothing proposition--if travel managers requested the data, they "got everything about transactions and policy but no ability to break it down," said Bonds. Profiles, for example, were sent as a massive document in which each name was alphabetized.

Avis Interactive on a monthly basis downloads onto servers all the transaction info stored on Avis' mainframe computers. Travel managers can pull the data off a Web site accessible through a password. Traveler profiles are updated daily. All that's required at the customer end is a desktop with Internet access. There is no charge for the service and the site offers "great speed in retrieving data," said an Avis spokesperson.

Travel managers instantly can find out if travelers are choosing the class of car mandated by the policy, whether they are using the corporate card to pay for rentals and whether they have signed up for extra insurance.

All Avis locations that participate in the Avis Wizard reservation system--99 percent of locations--instantly transmit transaction data to the mainframe that feeds Avis Interactive, provided the transaction is made using the company's worldwide corporate account discount number. Data for an Avis location that doesn't use Wizard still would be included, but it might be input into the Avis Interactive system a few days late, which means a transaction made in one month could appear falsely under the next month. In such instances, Avis Interactive would alert the user to the discrepancy.

The new service is one of the beneficiaries of Avis' purchase of PHH Leasing last year. PHH was using a similar interactive product for its leasing products and Avis was able to convert the technology to its own use, saving millions in R&D costs. It took Avis just six months to get the product up and running, compared with the two to four years it would have taken if the company had had to build it from scratch.