Consolidated Signs As CTD

<B> Consolidated Signs As CTD</B>

By Sarah Welt

Consolidated Stores Corp. of Columbus, Ohio, has become the latest ARC-certified Corporate Travel Department. The company, with $3.4 million in annual air sales, was accredited Feb. 19 and will begin using its ARC number on April 5.

Travel manager Henix Teegardin expects the do-it-yourself approach to shave 4 percent off its travel spend in 1999.

Consolidated Stores is no stranger to self-management, having operated since March 1996 as a branch office of Columbus-based consulting company Troilo and Associates--using its ARC number, but having all commissions returned directly to Consolidated. Before that, it had a traditional arrangement with Carlson Wagonlit Travel.

The idea to move to self-management came from Consolidated's vice president of human resources Jo Roney. The airline commission cuts "triggered her to pursue other avenues to help control costs and enhance revenue," Teegardin said. "Now we have total information right at our fingertips. We know that ARC settlement is at the end of every week and what to expect from the airlines, hotels and car rental companies." ARC reports will be filed electronically using the new Interactive Agent Reporting system.

As a customer of a conventional agency, Consolidated had a return of about 1 percent of its total air volume. This year, after integrating all travel expenses including agent salaries and benefit programs, it expects a 4 percent return.

Consolidated's travel will continue to be handled by the full-time employees already working in its travel office. Back-office accounting will be supplied by Trams under a contract signed last week. It already has its own CRS contract with Sabre.

Consolidated plans to negotiate with a 24-hour service vendor, even though it trains travelers to complete their plans during normal business hours so as not to incur extra costs. Teegardin already is evaluating expense reporting systems and plans to move on to booking down the road.

There has been a great deal of buzz in the industry about CTDs and insourcing travel in general. Alexandria, Va-based Travel Management Group president Tom Wilkinson said while many companies explore self-management to reduce costs and the fees paid to the travel agency, a lot of companies are interested not for economic reasons, but because they want a greater sense of control. He noted that insourcing makes sense for companies that have the capacity in-house to take on the responsibility, because the pieces of the program that can be insourced or outsourced are "infinitely flexible." But companies do need to be able to secure CRS contracts as well as be able to manage other vendor contract negotiations. While large companies often have the infrastructure to go the self-managed route, Wilkinson said one small client wants to do so because it is too small an account to get the service levels desired from its travel agency.

"We've got about five organizations doing analysis of self-managed travel," he said. "CTDs are becoming more important to the industry very quickly and I think we'll see the number of CTDs and rent-a-plates increase dramatically in the next few years. It is going to be a big chunk of the market.