Co. Tests Intranet Booking System
<I>Emeryville, Calif. </I>- After two years of waiting for technology to catch up to customer demand, Sybase Inc. this week will begin a 60-day acceptance test of an intranet-based version of the TravelNet Voyager automated booking system.
The test makes Sybase one of a handful of companies trying out an automated booking system linked to an intranet service bureau at their vendor's site.
Sybase has been using TravelNet technology to make travel reservations via e-mail, and to capture its travel spending data, since 1994. But as corporate travel manager at this West Coast provider of client-server and Internet software and services, Patricia Carlin has been anxious to move the process into real time-and onto her corporate intranet.
"Our corporate mission at Sybase is 'create, integrate, communicate,' and I wanted to take that mission and apply it to travel," Carlin said. "Now, the Internet has eliminated the platform issues, which has been very exciting to me. You can use the Voyager on the desktop or dial in.
"I realize that automated booking systems for the travel industry are in their infancy, and that what we have today won't be what we have in two years, or even in one year," she said. "But for now, Voyager is a viable system, and I find it exciting and fun to use."
To start, Carlin offered the opportunity of participating in the Voyager test to Sybase employees who traveled more than five times in the last quarter. For the test period, 30 travelers and travel arrangers at various domestic company locations will access Voyager through the service-bureau model over the Internet (see story, Page 1).
After two months, Carlin will decide whether to leave the database at TravelNet's site or to move the whole system onto the Sybase travel department's existing homepage on the company's intranet. Already, that site offers 40 documents of interest to travelers, including the full text or a one-page summary of Sybase's corporate travel policy, VAT information, fare tips and travel trivia. There also are links to other Websites that offer destination information, weather reports, health advisories, currency conversion tables and maps.
"My suspicion is that we'll bring the booking system back in-house and put it on the travel page," Carlin said. "We've maintained our own travel data internally for four years now, and I like having the ability to accumulate my own data and distribute my own reports whenever I choose."
Even the reporting chore is being rapidly simplified by the advances in technology. "For the past few months, I've given the company's controllers the ability to produce reports themselves, by giving them sample reports and instructions on how to download the data," Carlin said. "Now I don't have to do it, unless there is something specific I want to check on."
And having the full TravelNet database on site will allow her to easily collate travel information from Sybase's two agencies: American Express, which handles the bulk of the company's $15-to-$18 million domestic air volume, and Casto Travel, which handles a division on the West Coast.
This early in the testing process, Carlin said she "could not even begin to tell you" the actual cost of the system, or the savings it will generate. "TravelNet is a partner of ours, since they use Sybase software as their engine, and our arrangement is very convoluted," she said. While she has touched on the issue of renegotiating her agency contract to offer a financial incentive for automated bookings, she "wants to get the pilot out and make sure the agency is comfortable with the prospect before asking that directly."
In the long run, Carlin said, she would love to run concurrent tests of TravelNet with the three other major corporate booking systems-Internet Travel Network, Sabre's Business Travel Solutions and Microsoft's and American Express' Rome system-when they become available.
Amex has "worked very hard to help us with this test," she said, and as an Amex agency and card client, she has found their solutions to be effective. But she acknowledged that Amex "may well be unwilling" to go so far as to help test all four systems.
In the meantime, Carlin has other projects on her mind. She is already looking at online expense reporting systems for Sybase's 3,000 travelers, and is working with the company's controllers in the United Kingdom to consolidate policies and airline contracts as a first step toward a pan-European travel management program.
And while she has not yet developed a plan to bring an online booking system to Europe, the idea is already percolating. "All our employees, including those in the United Kingdom, have access to our travel homepage," she said.