Buyers Setting Stricter Travel Policies

We're also trying to eliminate redundant site inspections. We found within a period of time, we had four programs all doing site inspections to the same property. That's part of the benefit to the planner, but there's a cost to the company. The air costs aren't always covered.

BTN: What policy enforcement techniques are producing the biggest returns for your companies?

Giddens: One thing that we started doing last year that has really enforced what we're doing on policy is tracking our cost avoidances and sending that to management. We've been doing that in fleet since 1990. If someone calls and specifies a carrier, we talk them into taking a non-refundable, seven-day advance with a lower fare. From May to December 1996 we saved $980,000 and for the first three months of this year we've tracked $357,000. At the end of the year, we wrote a letter to all executive vice presidents detailing not only all travel costs, but the amount of money we avoided spending.

BTN: How are you dealing with the plethora of online booking options?

Fitzgerald: I've been doing the technology road show and am thoroughly convinced that everything is at least half-baked. I don't know if there is that much pent-up demand from the traveler. What we've done is look to position ourselves to go in. We're not a beta-type company; that's not our core business. So we'll ride in once it's fully evolved, after it's been beta tested by my esteemed colleagues.

What we've done to position ourselves is develop a platform so we're standard across the board on Microsoft, connected worldwide via e-mail. Also, we've started to develop our own private Web and developed our own benchmarking process reengineering software. We purchased PeopleSoft so all our HR data starts the activity and hopefully will feed the CRS profile and the T&E product. We have purchased T&E software from Portable and are just now rolling that out. We're positioning ourselves so that when we find the right product, we can roll it out.