Chevron Plots A Smart Card, E-Booking Course

<I>San Francisco</I> - A six-month study of Chevron Corp.'s travel purchasing process by an interdepartmental Quality Improvement Process team has resulted in recommendations to move forward with smart card technology and an electronic travel booking system.

If all goes according to plan, both the booking system and the smart card product will begin to roll out by the end of this year, and will be available to all of Chevron's 16,000 travelers by 1998.

By June, travel administration manager Nancy Godfrey plans to choose the best of the 10 responses to her request for proposals. Over the next few months, she will collaborate with her vendor to "customize, format, test and start rolling out" a system, Godfrey said.

But the stack of booking system proposals sprouting like spring wildflowers on her desk has convinced Godfrey that implementation could take slightly longer than she had hoped. While still sure that automating Chevron's booking and payment systems is feasible in the relatively near future, she now sees her own role in the process as being not just that of a customer, but of a co-developer.

"I do feel it's a viable goal, but I'm less sure of the timeline than I was six months ago," Godfrey said. "Ultimately, we want to roll out a good product, and if that takes six months longer, so be it."

In the "extremely comprehensive" RFP, Chevron asked for the ability to book, change and cancel reservations. Because the company's annual air volume of $100 million includes $60 million from outside the United States, the RFP asked to have information provided in a number of different languages. Because the company will "probably do direct links to our technology supplier to bypass the problems of the public Internet," it also asked for Internet availability for global travelers. And, Godfrey acknowledged, it threw in "some very out-there requests," like a mechanism for tracking non-refundable tickets.

After an initial investigation of the proposals, Godfrey determined that not all of what she needs is out there yet--and that in a number of ways the systems "are not quite ready."

"I understand it takes time to build these things, but there's a real gap between the corporate perception and the agency perception regarding the use of electronic systems, and a trust factor for the traveler as to how reliable all these systems are," she said. "That is not the fault of the systems alone. For an electronic booking to go through, the public Internet has to work, our corporate intranet has to work and the booking system has to work--and sometimes that all doesn't happen."

Still, the push toward technology from her own management--and, indeed, from Chevron's travelers--is not to be ignored. A survey that was mailed to 1,500 travelers, asking for feedback on online travel booking, yielded a very high response rate of more than 50 percent and evidence of overwhelming interest, Godfrey said. "Seventy percent said they'd try an automated system, and 30 percent said they'd use it tomorrow."

If Godfrey's involvement in getting the travel technology project off the ground will take hours more work than she had originally planned, she does not seem concerned. She is also unfazed by the constantly shifting online financial environment; neither the American nor the United online commission cap will affect her plan or her schedule.

"Chevron's corporate vision through the year 2001 is to migrate a lot of our business to electronic processes and to work directly with suppliers," she said. "Our vision is that this is a viable way of booking routine trips without the need for human intervention. We want an alliance with a technology company, and we will work with them to put in the time to get it to where it needs to be.