<I>Seattle</I> - The shortage of qualified travel agents plaguing corporate inplants and agencies has prompted Boeing Corp. to seek an automated booking solution to alleviate its growth pains.
After an exhaustive search of the market and its needs, Boeing this month began a pilot test of TravelNet's Voyager automated booking system with 200 travelers in Philadelphia. Over the next six months, Boeing expects to have a total of 500 employees using the software and collect enough data on policy compliance, customer satisfaction, savings and use, to be able to build its business case for purchase of an automated booking system. Crucial to the test is getting the software into the hands of those who book as many two or three tickets a day for multiple travelers.
Already, Boeing travel executives believe that if they can eliminate 50 percent of the calls coming into each of five reservation offices in the country, they can forego hiring additional agents, despite the tremendous growth the company is enjoying. If the proposed merger with McDonnell Douglas is approved this summer, use of such technology will be crucial.
"We want to decrease the hold time and increase our service," said Corrine Howells, travel services systems manager for Boeing. "Our hold time is too long," she added, declining to reveal exact numbers.
The travel department's goals are right in line with corporate strategy, noted Bob Jorgensen, senior manager of public relations for the company. "Cost, delivery and quality are three things that our new chairman of the board has set out in his 20-year goals. He wants to increase the quality and shorten the delivery."
With air volume of $92 million and almost 100,000 transactions in 1996, Boeing is one of the 20 largest corporate travel accounts. However, unlike most of its peers, Boeing employs its own reservationists, outsourcing ticketing, quality control and ARC reporting to preferred agency, Mutual Travel, Seattle.
The Problem:
Boeing's travel volume began escalating last year as the world's airlines not only ordered more existing aircraft from the company, but demanded development of new planes. By the fall of 1998, Boeing will be producing 43 airplanes a month, up from the 18 it was completing in the fall of 1996, said Jorgensen.
By October, "we had a very large increase in travel volume, our call hold time increased drastically and we weren't able to hire qualified agents fast enough," Howells said. "They simply weren't available in the market." Boeing doubled its agent staff during this time, but needed far more agents to handle the demand.
"We looked at e-mail, Apollo Fax; we looked at everything and implemented some efficiencies," Howells said. "But we were really looking for a breakthrough."
Surveying travelers, Boeing's travel staff learned just how important online booking options were to its techno-savvy employees. Some complained that fellow travelers were booking online, why couldn't they? Others began trying the multitude of consumer booking options that began flooding their mailboxes from airlines, computer reservation systems and third parties. Self-booking posed serious concerns, as Boeing could risk being able to fulfill its negotiated agreements, Howells said.
The Process:
By October, Boeing forged a relationship with Mutual Travel, whereby the agency's manager of business development and technology, Greg O'Neil, would serve as an unbiased consultant to help Howells analyze booking products and select one to pilot. By December, the duo prepared a matrix comparing the features, benefits and characteristics of eight products ranging from e-mail systems to those offered by both CRS and software developers for review by the firm's national managers. Three products were highlighted as possibilities.
Then, Howells and O'Neil began studying whether the products could handle negotiated fares and complex travel policy. After a month or so, the two took a step back and considered how such a product would be used in Boeing's culture, where travel arrangers book travel for multiple travelers. They then devised a new set of criteria to evaluate the remaining contenders by "must haves," "wants" and "nice features."
Among the must haves were the ability for travel arrangers to book travel for multiple travelers; online availability of hotels; administrative access to pre- and post-trip reports and market segment analysis; agency support; CRS access to profiles, with any changes automatically updated in the CRS; and the ability to turn on a look, but can't book option.
Under wants, managers told Howells and O'Neil that low-fare comparisons would be nice, but weren't mandatory. Other wants were having the ability to change and cancel reservations, detailed hotel information, repeat trip capability and a direct link to Avis and Thisco's inventory without going through a CRS.
One of the biggest issues, Howells said, turned out to be where Boeing would rank in priority with vendors.
"If a vendor has five $100 million to $200 million travel clients, where would Boeing be?" Howells questioned. "We wanted to be the top concern."
As one of the nation's largest companies--and one of the biggest travel spenders to pilot an automated booking system--Boeing has the clout to expect no less. But it offers technology vendors the ability to learn how to tweak products to benefit other large companies.
"In any software product, once you get it out there at the customer site, they will have ideas that will have applicability to other customers," said Randy Malin, general manager of TravelNet, Santa Clara. "They're going to make us a better product," he added of Boeing.
Thrilled that Boeing selected TravelNet for the pilot, Malin complimented company executives for their thorough approach taken on selecting a system. "We like to see a corporation look at the full range of issues in travel management, issues such as how corporate discounts and policy are handled. Because this whole business is in its infancy, everything is being thrown into a generic bucket called booking tools. But we've been trying to make corporations think about the entire travel process. While we'd like to sell lots of systems, the current emphasis on doing a pilot first with a small group of employees is exactly the approach corporations should be taking," Malin said.
Although pricing was definitely an issue in the beginning, Howells said, "it ended up not being a factor in the systems we reviewed."
By this fall, Boeing expects to build the business case to justify the capital needed to buy an automated booking system. Before making a final decision on a system, Howells and O'Neil expect to take a final look at the market and features of all vendors. In initial projections, Howells and O'Neil estimate that as many as 5,000 of Boeing's 35,000 frequent travelers could be using an automated system after the first year. In five years, the two estimate that 20 to 50 percent of bookings could pass through an automated system. "If we really hit the 10 percent to 20 percent of top travelers, we actually reduce the calls, because we put fares into the hands of travelers," O'Neil said.
Demand for the product has been strong, Howells noted, with more than 90 people requesting access to it within 15 minutes after news of the pilot was sent via the corporate e-mail network.