Buyers, CTW Audience Explore E-Fulfillment Issues

Sam Andraos of Toronto-based AIM International Management in late March at Corporate Travel World in New York moderated a two-person tutorial on online booking and fulfillment with Computer Associates director of corporate travel Ellen Hanzl and Bank of America vice president of corporate travel Deborah Steele. An edited transcript follows.

Sam Andraos: What are the major elements for the successful implementation of online booking, as well as the challenges?

Deborah Steele: It all starts with executive buy-in, then you need a strong communications plan. We use an internal Web site to publicize as much as we can. We also mandated our online tool about two-and-a-half years ago and then went through a lot of training. Last year, we got a little complacent because we felt we had done the initial rollout and would continue to roll along to increased adoption. But we had stagnated at about 65 percent adoption and were just kind of hovering there, so we decided it was again time to publicize the tool. A lot of times, the users may be administrative assistants, where turnover levels are higher, so it's important to keep that training on an ongoing basis.

As far as hurdles, at every company there are always those special travel arrangers who think they shouldn't have to go online, so we've had a lot of one-off conversations working with the business managers, and that's really helped us. I think our tool is one of the best in class—GetThere—but the technology is still relatively new and we have had some system stability challenges. These are the kinds of things we've needed to get through with our providers to let them know exactly what is the impact on downtime. It's more than just the cost impact: Of course any time a booking has to go through an agent it will cost more, but also any day an arranger can't get on the tool, they may not come back next time.

Audience member: Do you have a traditional agency doing fulfillment or an online fulfillment provider?

Steele: We've worked with our traditional agency. We're still on the Rosenbluth platform, and we expect some changes in the next six months, though not significant ones because it sounds like Amex will be adopting some of Rosenbluth's best practices. Rosenbluth for us has used a fulfillment center in North Dakota. That's been an area of focus, to move as many transactions as possible to touchless. There's a lot of financial gain on both sides, and the transaction price for us is about 75 percent less.

Andraos: In terms of adoption, do you have a fully mandated program? What is your adoption level? Please give us two major activities you've done to achieve that level.

Ellen Hanzl: We haven't officially mandated. The key to success has been upper management buy-in. We're a technology company, so we have tremendous traveler feedback. We're looking at an average of 65 percent. We have a lot of consultants who can't access the system while on the road, so we're trying to find out what is the maximum we can reach.

As for two major activities, we reached out initially with training and orientation to travel arrangers, and we also did a lot of Web training and raffled off a Volkswagen.

Audience member: What sort of things do you have to watch out for when you are going touchless?

Hanzl: What has helped us is the [quality control] software program every reservation goes through. It's no small task. As a travel manager, it's your responsibility to familiarize your fulfillment organization with your needs, your policy and your relationships. So what you're doing is building logic into the software that says, "It's within policy, it's a per diem, it's a preferred vendor, the credit card is in there and it's touchless, and only then it gets ticketed. If any action needs to be taken on the PNR, put it over here." Then you have a dedicated team of people for full service.

Steele: Rosenbluth built a lot of automation to pull what's out of policy. Another enhancement GetThere rolled out with its version 6.0 was better reason codes, so we were able to use those codes to build in some of the things we want travelers to tell us about their air choices. We also rolled out in the past three months the Eclipse Advisors tool called Dacoda, and we have the same codes there for the telephonic agents. The jury's still out about whether the agent's judgment and the traveler's judgment get the same result.

Audience member: Do you use provisional itineraries, and when do you think GetThere will get there?

Steele: There are certain parts of our business where the schedules are very volatile and the travel arranger always wants to take something and kind of look at it with the traveler before making a decision. That is something we've been pushing for. It seems like there have been some systems glitches with some of the airline connections and in that situation there are also things, like the upgrade processes, we've been pushing on because they've been costing us a lot. I'm not sure what the GetThere timeframe is on that.

Andraos: What are the major costs of implementation, and did you discover hidden costs?

Steele: From the start, you'll realize some savings, but as far as startup costs, we needed to identify and support it with a system administrator. Also, just from a time perspective, we've learned you need to dedicate the time to testing to make sure that once you implement and customize it, it will work on your side. We've spent a lot of resources in corporate travel and in our technology team to make sure we've done all the right testing because you don't want to see a loss of adoption.

Also, there's time spent on audits. In particular, making sure you have the right hotels or implementing tools like Dacoda to be sure the preferencing is coming out the right way.

As for hidden costs, there's the booking time. We're seeing that the more the travel arrangers use it, they're finding such tools as trip templates allow them to reduce time spent. The other big thing is adds and changes to itineraries. A lot of times, the users would book air in advance and get that ticket, but they wouldn't necessarily book the hotel and then later you can't connect those reservations and end up double-paying online.

Andraos: What is the percentage of assisted and non-assisted transactions, and have you seen savings?

Hanzl: We've definitely seen savings in cost per transaction in going from traditional, where you have the same overhead and salaries whether or not the phone is ringing. With this model, you're paying for exactly what you need. For us, 75 percent of our reservations are a combination of low or no touch.

A company can drive no touch. There is certain information we want to see and sometimes we want action taken on that reservation because of our policy. It's not always in the vendors' power to increase no touch, but if you want control over certain issues and want to look at it, you have to accept paying more for low touch. Now we look at who is calling in, and then we'll contact them. Maybe they couldn't log on once, called the agency and didn't go back again, so we can call each individual and find out what is the reason and what can we do about it.

There's that percentage of people you're never going to capture because of the nature of where they are or how they travel. Right now, we're holding steady at that 75 percent, and low touch costs us about $2 more than no touch.

It's customizable, like when nonrefundables really became nonrefundable, we said we wanted to have them spit those out and look at them. Later, when the rules changed, we went back to the previous practice of not looking at the nonrefundables. It's within your power as the travel manager to go to senior management and say, "We can get this cost down, but we're going to release this control."

Steele: We're between 50 percent and 55 percent and to get to the next level we may need some cultural changes internally where maybe we push the upgrade process back to the traveler to go directly to the airlines. With the upgrade process, we're looking for the airlines to work with GetThere to automate that.

We've also categorized reasons for touch and drilled down on those one at a time. Early on, people would put in the comments field, "Have a great day," or whatever was on their mind, so we're communicating to them the cost impact. People also were putting in, "need an aisle seat" or other things we realized were already in the profile.

Audience member: Have you defined what transactions should be booked online, and have you found GetThere's 6.0 is more user friendly?

Steele: Our mandate is for simple domestic bookings. We did an audit with Topaz about one year ago, and we had them look at simple and complex bookings. We found that the average ticket price was higher online for the complex international bookings, so we wanted to focus the travel agents on that.

On 6.0, yes and no. Visually, it looks good, but a lot of the icons have caused page hangs and that's where our travelers have been frustrated. I think GetThere is working on some things to pull that out. Now there's that nice round kind of formatting, but I think they're going to cut that out because it will take up less memory.

I think that they have learned some lessons from our implementation.