<B> Chain Leads Folio Charge</B>
<I>Wyndham System To Deliver Full Folio Data</I>
By Maria P. Vallejo
<I>Dallas</I> - Wyndham International next month will roll out a new software system that offers travel buyers much-sought-after access to full hotel portfolio data.
The multimillion dollar technology project was designed to help collect data for Wyndham's guest history database. But the system also will move buyers closer to a paperless expense reporting process, provide them with a means of quickly tracking policy discrepancies and improve the accuracy of the data upon which they rely for negotiations.
The initiative makes Wyndham the first hotel chain to respond to buyers' calls for electronic folio data, a quest pushed heavily in recent years by both the Association of Corporate Travel Executives and the National Business Travel Association (<I>BTN,</I> July 28, 1997).
ACTE president Earl Foster, director of global travel for New York-based Joseph E. Seagram & Sons, said the new system is the first small step toward an industry revolution, and may be the impetus needed to dislodge hotel companies from their current stagnation. "We were trying to see if we could get this going last year. But in this day and age, with it still being a seller's market, discussions slowed down to a snail's pace," he said. "It's something that we need desperately and I really applaud Wyndham for doing this. Once it's actually being done and the first data is out there, it will make other companies do it too or be at a competitive disadvantage."
Indeed, Seagram may become one of the greatest beneficiaries of the project. The electronic capture of full hotel folios is the missing link needed to enable a completely paperless expense reporting environment. Already at Seagram, travelers' expense reports are automatically prepopulated with card, car and air data, but paper hotel folios still must be submitted to show the breakdown of room, food and incidental charges. "As long as travelers pay their travel expenses with a corporate card, the folio is the only receipt they have to submit manually," Foster said. "If we can get the folio data to the charge card, the traveler won't have to submit anything. Then we can go totally paperless, and that will encourage the traveler to use the preferred card."
Other buyers agreed that the new technology could mean time savings in gathering data and catching cost discrepancies and policy violations almost immediately.
"This would be awesome. It would make it a lot easier for us," said Debbie Shircliff, travel manager for the Americas of Indianapolis-based Thomson Consumer Electronics. "A lot of the time, you can track your travelers through a preferred agency or credit card. But sometimes there are big discrepancies between them, and you always question what is really correct. This will give us a way to troubleshoot those discrepancies."
Thomson stands to benefit more than most companies from the new project, given that its travelers spend more room nights at Wyndham properties than anywhere else in the Americas. Buyers like Shircliff may begin reaping the benefits of the new technology when the complete rollout concludes midyear, said Mack Koonce, Wyndham's executive vice president of marketing and strategic planning.
Developed in March and beta tested in three hotels, the unnamed program extracts guests folios directly from each hotel's property management system, usually during the regular nightly audit. The information then is exported to Wyndham's central database, where it is dissected for various uses, such as compiling guest history information, determining booking sources and quantifying preferred buyers' business volume.
"We're capturing 100 percent of the data from the PMS," Koonce said. "We think it's the way systems are headed, so we expect a reasonable number of companies to want the data. And we will have the capability to deliver it any way they want it."
Wyndham officials now plan to research how corporate buyers think the data can best be transported, at what intervals it should be sent and how it might be used.
For some travel managers the answer is simple. Shircliff, for example, currently solicits folio data directly from the hotels twice a year. "For most of our business, I go to the hotels to get the information. For me, it would be great if I could get it electronically," she said. "And it would be nice to see the information more often as more hotels set room night projection targets."
Travel manager Betts DeMott-Cravotto of Clorox Co., based in Oakland, Calif., would rather access the information herself over the Internet at her leisure. That would allow her to come to the negotiating table with more accurate data and improve her relationship with preferred hotel companies, she said.
Foster would prefer to have the data transferred directly to his charge card company, which then would ship the information to Seagram's data warehouse. Like DeMott-Cravotto, Foster plans to use the information to improve his negotiating stance by leveraging the amount his travelers spend on the hotel's goods and services beyond the room rate.
But not every travel buyer saw a real benefit in the new technology. Said John Lowry, supervisor of meeting planning and the hotel program for New York-based Philip Morris, "I'm not sure how useful I would actually find it. I already know which travelers are staying at a Wyndham hotel and how much they are paying. I get that as a pretrip overnight printout and through the corporate card. I don't know if I need access to folio or rollup data."
Lowry said traveler compliance with the Philip Morris program is at 99.32 percent. Pretrip exception reports are automatically printed out and checked by the travel office, as are monthly reports on average booked rates. And Philip Morris is still a long way from a completely paperless process. "We have an electronic process, but it's certainly not paperless, and I don't see that for years to come," he said. "The way our expenses are done, this would not be an asset."
The software itself, meanwhile, has been tweaked and improved after results from the beta test showed that chainwide PMS standards were needed to make the data usable. Although all Wyndham properties use the same two PMSs, they do not have standardized data fields. The system can run on both of Wyndham's PMSs, Fidelio and HIS, operating on an Oracle platform.
"We didn't have as much standardization for each property to make sure all fields are consistent," Koonce said. "If you don't have that standard, you don't get the full value of the program."
Since rolling out the system to a property therefore means standardizing the existing data, it takes about six months to add each hotel. Since the beta test, seven additional hotels have come online.
Wyndham is combining its Year 2000 project with the PMS standardization program. As hotels are made Y2K ready, they are being equipped to export folio data to the database.