CO Demands Data Feed

<B>CO Demands Data Feed</B>
<I>Requires Corp. Accounts To Process Info. Through Prism System</I>

By David Jonas

All Continental Airlines corporate accounts now are required to electronically feed their booking data to the Prism Group as part of the carrier's new Corporate Insight program. More than 250 corporations, both new and renewed accounts, already are using the program, which went live this spring.

British Airways last week also switched on a modified version of the Prism system, while other carriers have expressed "considerable interest," according to Prism president Michael Whitesage.

Highlighting the need for harmonized data between corporate clients and their air suppliers, Continental said Corporate Insight provides a faster, automated and confidential solution for data exchange. Of particular note is the ability to provide flown data from the carrier back to the corporate client, a sore spot with many buyers.

"This will help us develop better corporate programs," said Dave Hilfman, Continental's vice president of multinational sales and revenue programs. "We can measure performance and see what the savings are. Over time, we have been a little better than average in reporting but we saw that we needed a better, faster, automated way of doing this and giving clients the information they haven't seen before."

Prism, an Albuquerque, N.M.-based consultancy that has been processing data for carriers for more than six years, has been working on this particular system for four years after receiving feedback from airlines. "We knew they had a need to automate management of corporate relationships," Whitesage said. "Normalization of the data is key. Different data sources treat data differently, so that needs to be standardized and error-corrected."

Indeed, several sources indicated that data can be quite "dirty" when an airline receives it. "There is so much time and energy spent chasing information from different systems and different agencies," said Monisa Cline, Continental's managing director of corporate sales. "For bigger deals with large national customers, looking at data can take three or four weeks. But now with clean data, the process on our end can be as fast as a week."

The process requires corporations to send detailed transactional data from their agencies to Prism, which then standardizes it, converts segment data to true origination and destination data, among other things, and sends it to Continental. The carrier at that point looks at city-pair information and identifies opportunities to bump up discounts and gain share in certain markets.

While Prism has been in this business for years, this new development provides airlines with applications to manage contracts. Prism derives its revenue by licensing those applications, meaning the corporate client incurs no additional cost.

Currently, Prism is engineering the feedback from Continental's revenue accounting to its system to provide what has been elusive lift information back to clients. For this part of the process, the carrier is beta testing with a few clients as it learns to manage that data.

"Airlines have a difficult time, as do corporations, monitoring contract performance because contract terms comprise many dissimilar markets," Whitesage said. "Our analysis with carriers showed that two-thirds of account manager time is spent trying to make sense of contracts. This software, based on contract terms, does the computations. Existing reporting does not work because you have to aggregate data, which results in an average of averages and therefore unreliable numbers."

As a result, Continental's corporate clients will receive from Prism monthly electronic reports detailing their performance, enabling both sides to more easily structure and modify deals.

Aside from an expedited process for both new accounts and renewals--and easier performance monitoring--Corporate Insight has other benefits, including the ability to identify unused tickets, both paper-issued and electronic, and identify travelers who are changing tickets at the counter and violating corporate policy. Continental also said the system will facilitate seamless data analysis with alliance partners, even if they change, as they often do.

Whitesage said the system also benefits travel management companies. "Today, as travel agencies are being disintermediated, this reinforces one of their most important roles: providing information to corporations and the suppliers," he said, adding that Prism derives data from more than 500 agencies.

"This is the appropriate approach and much better than the overall tracking of revenue that has been proposed in other areas," said Tom Nulty, president and chief operating officer of Navigant International. "I believe the role that the product is playing--allowing information to remain confidential--is the most appropriate way to get market-share information to carriers for corporate performance."

Of the more than 250 Continental accounts already flowing data into the Prism system, about 40 percent are renewals, including Shell Oil, which has significant traffic in and out of Continental's Houston hub. Ford Motor Co. also is participating in the program.

The remaining 60 percent are new deals, many of which were driven by E-Z Deal, the carrier's jumpstart program aimed at getting small and medium-size businesses up and running with a corporate discount program, requiring minimal analysis and incurred risk.

"Chasing data normally is a huge chunk of the process," said June Bennett, Continental vice president of sales. "Now, with E-Z Deal, sales managers can make decisions on the spot and tell potential clients what the discount level will be." E-Z Deal complements RewardOne, Continental's soft-dollar incentive program for even smaller corporations (BTN, Oct. 11, 1999).

Buyers, in general, have been dissatisfied with the level of data exchange with their airline partners and now are demanding more as point-of-sale deals become more complex. Kathy Samuel, director of travel operations for Walt Disney Worldwide Services in Burbank, Calif., said, "We've been through a couple of audits, questioning whether an airline's flown volume is lower than what we thought." Samuel, who uses TRX to combine data from several agencies, added that some airlines have in place reliable processes while others are antiquated.

"Carriers have shown an inability to get me data, and sometimes they are one to three months late," said Henry Apfel, general manager of the travel services division at Kirchman Corporation in Orlando, who identified Delta and Trans World Airlines as two poor performers in this area. "A lot of times the salespeople in the field are as much in the dark about flown data as we are."

Asked whether there is potential for improvement, Apfel said, "It's such a difficult thing to believe because they have misrepresented figures for so long. It's data distrust."

For its part, Delta said clean exchange is a key component in corporate relationships but has not seen widespread requests for flown data from its clients.

"We are addressing some requests on a case-by-case basis, sometimes direct and sometimes through a third-party vendor," said Steve Scheper, Delta's director of agency and corporate programs, though he would not divulge the names of which tech vendors are involved and which are being evaluated. "We have yet to see a land-rush on requests for flown level detail and we still are in the early understanding of data flow and data details."

Other carriers were not available to comment on their data exchange mechanisms.

"There is a fairly severe pain point with buyers on information in general and it amazes me that in 2000 there are still complaints about data," said Norm Rose of TravelTech Consulting in Belmont, Calif. "It shows the need for groups like Prism, ISP and others to remove that disconnect." ISP now is part of TRX.

While Corporate Insight will help travel managers get the data they need from carriers while providing other benefits, many buyers still have some concerns. "Some corporations are concerned because they felt data reporting has been sufficient," Hilfman said. "It is the old adage that embarking on new technology is great as long as that change is not happening to you. Nobody has flat out said no, yet. And not everyone has said yes."

Continental has made certain that Corporate Insight, which is completely confidential and controlled by corporate travel managers, is in no way related to the controversial client code proposed by the International Air Transport Association (BTN, July 10).

"These data are truly consensual because a company can decide where it goes and its purpose since they own it," Whitesage said. "They can mask certain elements and even demand that data be destroyed at the end of the contract term."

He is confident this type of two-way data exchange eventually will become an industry standard. "Those carriers that do not have the ability to provide this level of information will be disadvantaged."

Susan Hopley, senior vice president of corporate strategy at TRX, said that the travel industry seems to be trending toward such data exchange. "There is a move toward an open-book policy, and carriers are much less reluctant now to share data with those corporations they have close relationships with," she said. "In our view, you need a three-way street--connecting credit card data, booking info and flown data--to make the whole process truly effective."

In fact, TRX has established XML-based triangular links with "four or five" corporations, with many more to follow. "The XML-based transaction processing capability does not require any of the three data streams to change format," Hopley said, adding that clients using the service can request flown data at any point, but typically look at it on a month-by-month basis.

Continental's Corporate Insight is the second phase of a larger program that began with Sales Insight, Continental's internal system for its sales force (BTN, Feb. 22, 1999). Sales Insight now will interface with the corporate tool and provides the carrier with similar data, empowering Continental to make pricing and scheduling adjustments.

<I>~Jay Campbell contributed to this article.