<H1> Buyers Eye Tech</H1>By Cheryl Rosen
No one has the perfect end-to-end technology solution, and the pricing models-now all over the map-have yet to be worked out. But half a dozen travel buyers at a <I>BTN</I> automation roundtable, held on the day before the NBTA annual conference, evidenced how real the demand is for these products.
Businesses are looking to buy booking through expense reporting systems because senior management and frequent travelers are demanding them, the potential savings from such systems are huge and the return on investment will cover the cost of implementation probably within 12 months and certainly within 24. And travel managers must provide solutions soon.
"The travel management community is very ripe for technology," said Bay Networks travel manager Bob Lichtman, of Santa Clara, Calif. "We've already been waiting a year-if we don't get something soon, people are going to start building their own."
Into the final lap now in bringing automated, integrated systems to market, the travel management companies seem to have the lead, and three of them took <I>BTN</I> up on its challenge to show us the state of their art. On the agenda were Carlson Wagonlit Travel, which demo'd its ActOne suite of travel booking, management reporting and expense reporting products (<I>BTN</I>, May 20); new partners WorldTravel Partners and GE Capital, showing their respective booking and expense reporting systems (<I>BTN</I>, July 29); and New Jersey super-regional TravelOne, its expense reporting system newly paired with the E-Travel booking system (<I>BTN</I>, July 29).
Notable in the course of the afternoon were two insights. While vendors are armed with price lists, virtually no early-adopter travel manager is paying full price, and few are paying anything at all. By the end of the long afternoon of product demonstrations, suppliers had taken to using the term "rack rates" when quoting fees, at least for customers signing up in 1996. By 1997 and 1998, though, they say, vendors will get tougher as they try to recoup their investments until, eventually and inevitably, prices begin to fall.
For this year, at least, it is clear that intranet solutions are hotter than ever (<I>BTN</I>, Feb. 12). Said WTP's corporate travel and technology president Danny Hood, "our ResAssist product is a really good distributed application. The only problem with it was that it was a distributed application."
While many panelists seemed wary of transaction fees (see accompanying story), each agency offered at least the choice of a single flat license or a transaction-based fee. WTP quoted $100,000 to $200,000 for a perpetual license; a $6.50 transaction fee; or a gain-sharing program, for customers without capital budgets, under which the agency will "keep 25 cents out of every dollar the customer saves."
Under the transaction-based pricing, a "transaction" is defined as "a reservation, including air, hotel and car, and a ticket issued; changes and cancellations are built into the price," said Hood. In addition, transaction-fee customers will pay a setup fee ranging from $5,000 to $25,000.
WTP also is offering its agency customers a flat charge of 50 to 75 cents per transaction that will include all technology products under their management fee, Hood noted.
TravelOne's booking system will retail at $5 to $10 per transaction or $25 to $50 per person; the ExpenseOne module "is in the $80-to-$120-per-person range, plus a maintenance fee." But, added sales and marketing vice president Andy McGraw, "We are eager to work with customers and we will be aggressive on pricing with early adopters."
Carlson listed a "rack rate" of $9.95 per person per month for its SoloAct booking system and a sliding-scale range of $44.95 to $69.96 per user, or a flat license fee of $120,000 to $160,000, for the TransAct expense reporting system. Both systems also come with an additional 18 percent cost for ongoing support and maintenance. Carlson's InterAct management reporting system goes for $3,000 to $7,000.
Each of the three systems offers unique features. WTP allows travel managers to set up corporate headquarters and other sites as destination cities, and its expense reporting system offers daily updates of corporate card data.
The TravelOne/E-Travel product allows easy changes to corporate policy parameters, and a seat map that shows travelers the exact configuration of their plane, clearly delineating seats being held for preferred frequent flyers. But in its pricing display, travelers first choose a flight and then are offered prices and options, rather than the system offering preferred itineraries right at the outset.
The Carlson ActOne system, which uses the well-known TravelNet Voyager booking engine, allows travelers to build personal databases of their most frequent city pairs and shows flights that are sold out as well as those on which seats are still available. It also lists all flights clearly, prices included, on a single screen, and offers a "what if" capability that allows travelers to run through "What if I left 24 hours earlier?" scenarios. On the back end, the system-which will hit the market in September-will offer the ability to pull together all travelers' files and transfer them in one batch into A/P for processing.