Buyers Split On Using Pre-Trip Approval

<B>Buyers Split On Using Pre-Trip Approval</B>

By Jay Campbell

Automated pre-trip authorization is gaining some interest among cost-conscious companies and their vendors, but there is no consensus in the industry on whether it is a sensible way to trim costs.

Corporate online booking vendor E-Travel last week said it won the business of Melville, N.Y.-based Gentiva Health Services, in large part, for its relatively new pre-trip authorization functionality. A week earlier, Minneapolis-based Gelco Information Network and SatoTravel in Arlington, Va., announced a partnership to develop automated travel management solutions, mainly for government accounts, that include pre-trip authorization.

These are not the first vendors to provide at least partially automated pre-trip approval. With GetThere and IBM, Toyota and Xerox have paved the way for integrating pre-trip approval with both reservations and expense reporting.

Many sources, however, said the extra layer of bureaucracy--even automated bureaucracy--is too much to pay for what often ends up as a rubber stamp anyway. Much also depends on company culture.

Gentiva and other companies are interested, in part, because pre-trip approval can prevent unnecessary trips, "even if it is another layer," said Gentiva director of corporate travel Barbara Finn. "But it does depend on your company culture."

Powered by the Workflow technology provided by E-Travel's parent, Oracle Corp., the pre-trip mechanism is part of E-Travel Administrator, E-Travel's software that programs preferred suppliers, policies and negotiated rates into the booking tool.

Administrator automates pre-trip approval by e-mailing reservation details to supervisors. The trip then is subject to approval before it can be routed to the fulfillment center for ticketing. Within the e-mail system, the supervisor can approve, disapprove, seek modifications on or forward the request to another manager. If the supervisor is out of the office, he or she can have the software automatically forward the request to another decision maker. Travelers also can view their approval status and imminent trips can be prioritized.

The features work with "nearly all leading standards-based e-mail systems, including Microsoft Outlook, Lotus and Netscape Messenger," said senior director of marketing Rob Wald. E-Travel claimed it has the "only fully integrated, out-of-the-box pre-trip feature."

The system is limited in that it requires corporate hierarchy information derived from E-Travel's own human resources integration feature, which is not compatible with all HR systems. Gateway Inc., which enjoys high adoption of the E-Travel tool (BTN, June 25), created a pre-trip justification process but could not use E-Travel's option because Gateway uses PeopleSoft's HR software.

A number of other vendors, such as Worldspan (see story, page 1), can offer a system in which the approval occurs after ticketing.

A small handful of companies also have integrated authorization with their expense processes. At Xerox (BTN, Jan. 29), travelers put together an estimated trip cost before they go away and when they return, authorization is required only if they have overrun their trip budget or violated other policies. Toyota has integrated authorization into the reservation process, but supervisors execute approvals within the IBM-provided expense tool to kick off expense reporting.

Toyota and Xerox use the DirectCorporate booking tool from GetThere, which offers integration with a number of leading expense systems.

But not all companies want to use pre-trip approval all the time, and many are unsure of whether they want it to go beyond the standard policy control that travel agents and now corporate booking tools have in place.

Even less clear is whether pre-trip authorization is a feature for which buyers are willing to pay extra to online booking or other technology vendors. E-Travel levies an additional charge for its E-Travel Workflow option, which includes unfinished reservation notification. E-Travel, which Oracle has put up for sale (see story, page 4), plans to add more features to the Workflow offering.

GetThere offers pre-trip functionality packaged with its DirectCorporate tool at no extra charge, but director of travel applications Jay Gabany questioned the practicality of pre-trip approval, even as some GetThere clients do use it. Calling it a "desperate effort to rein in travel" typically resulting from "a reluctant acknowledgment that other methods to control travel aren't working," Gabany said even the latest corporate cost-cutting wave has not prompted any GetThere clients to reconsider pre-trip approval. "We're not getting questions about it," he said. "A few customers do use it, but they tend to turn it on for a few months then turn it back off again."

Gabany said GetThere is focused on "making sure a company's travel program is as effectively managed as possible at the point of sale so they don't need to resort to something so extreme."

As such, travel managers can configure GetThere to disallow policy-breaking bookings that are outside of policy or to forward only exceptions as requests to supervisors.

Several sources said travel managers often can catch egregious buys before it's too late using their data reporting.

Gabany listed a slew of issues with pre-trip authorization, from having to rework policy and process to fielding likely complaints.

E-Travel's Wald, acknowledging the issues, said, "It's a significant business process change. People are not used to getting approval for trips."

Some buyers also doubted the need. "My philosophy is that it becomes pretty bureaucratic and ends up being a rubber stamp anyway," said Peter Buchheit, director of travel and meeting services at Black and Decker in Towson, Md.

SatoTravel vice president of strategic relations Mike Premo, whose effort with Gelco is for a much more complicated pre-trip process designed for government use, said, "people are generally of two minds" on corporate use of pre-trip approval. "They're either into simplifying and easing the burden for the traveler, or the opposite, with a high level of front-end control to the expense. The question is whether the payback is worth the control."

Finding the proper level of control depends largely on culture, noted Business Travel Coalition chairman Kevin Mitchell. "Is it right to hit a sales person empowered to do million-dollar deals with pre-trip authorization?" he asked.