Corporate-Airline Online Booking: One Year Later

<B>Corporate-Airline Online Booking: One Year Later</B>

By David Jonas

One year after Delta's senior vice president of sales and distribution Vince Caminiti promised delegates at the National Business Travelers Association annual conference in Minneapolis a workable solution for directly accessing corporate rates via the Web (BTN, Aug. 2, 1999), Delta and its competitors have yet to bring the concept to market. However, Delta has made progress in the past 12 months and continues to beta test the system with corporate accounts. Likewise, Northwest and US Airways have taken the first small steps toward uninhibited online corporate bookings accompanied by all-important data capture.

Delta now has six corporate accounts testing its system, ranging in size from 25 to 200 travelers. "We slowly will move in more accounts as the system becomes more robust and we learn the nuances of managing the product," said Steve Scheper, Delta's director of agency and corporate programs. "By the third quarter, we aggressively will be looking for our field salespeople to feed us accounts for loading into the system."

One lesson learned was the importance of integrating corporate functionality with the consumer site. For starters, that enables travelers from participating companies to simply enter their frequent flyer number, instead of a separate corporate ID, and let the system recognize them. "It works nicely because when functionality is added to the consumer site, it can be added to corporate area as well," Scheper said. Car rental and hotel bookings, for example, could be added in that way.

Delta also reports positive feedback on the reporting functionality and is looking at expanding it to include reports not related to Web site booking. "In that way, we can use the Web site as a vehicle for more corporate reporting," Scheper explained.

Meanwhile, work on connecting with E-Travel, the first third-party vendor to partner with Delta, already is underway. The carrier is "aggressively pursuing" similar partnerships.

The Delta Technologies Group currently is building a common booking engine for Deltamatic, the carrier's internal reservation system. "Once established, that will enable us to connect easily through simple standards, such as XML," Scheper said. "We expect the first phase of that common booking engine to be in place by the first part of next year."

On the meetings side, Delta sometime next year expects to have an offshoot of the corporate booking site up and running for meetings and incentives.

Like Delta, Northwest also is working with a handful of large clients to prepare direct Internet bookings for corporate travelers. The system, expected to launch by October, will be demonstrated this week at the NBTA convention.

According to Al Lenza, Northwest vice president of distribution planning, seven accounts with existing corporate deals in place and based "in the heartland served by Northwest" currently are involved in developing the product. "They are interested in getting higher discounts based on market share but also getting a benefit from reducing our distribution costs," Lenza said.

Northwest has delayed full implementation in order to firm up the data reporting aspect of the system. "The data is the key ingredient of the process," said Peter Kivestu, vice president of the direct program. "We decided to develop a reporting engine that would have a nice synergy with internal systems for sales managers, so both sides are looking at the same data presented in similar fashion."

Reports will include complete trip-by-trip data in real time and other elements, such as policy compliance, that will come in separate summary reports either on a weekly or monthly basis.

Northwest still is undecided about including exclusive cybersaver fares for corporate use. "We continue to think this is more an emotional issue," Lenza said. "We have no problem including those special weekly fares, but they only are for 20 roundtrip city pairs a week and are highly restricted. We do not want that sort of thing to further delay implementation."

Travelers will enter the site--which will be separate from, but linked directly with, www.nwa.com--by inputting a corporate designator. From there, the booking process will be similar to regular consumer bookings. "It's a portal-like concept, whereby travelers can link to frequent flyer information, mapping, destination information, etc.," Kivestu said, adding that hotel and car bookings will be integrated. "The system has the capability of loading special arrangements with other suppliers so travelers have the opportunity for complete trip bookings right there on the site." Connections to such suppliers will be funneled through Worldspan.

Meanwhile, Northwest is forging agreements with third-party vendors to create direct corporate relationships. "We have a letter of intent signed with GetThere for a fairly attractive direct model and have meetings set up with E-Travel during the NBTA conference. We also are working with Via, of course, and while Andersen Consulting is the only corporate using it, Via will be remarketing to agencies. We also have an agreement with Worldspan for TripManager," Lenza explained. "With those four, we think we have pretty good representation with third parties in the market."

Such third-party connections, while separate from corporate bookings through the Northwest Web site, are another element in the carrier's developing suite of Internet products.

US Airways also is the developmental stage of its corporate online booking product (BTN, April 3). It has made the most progress on the meetings front, including an exclusive booking site for delegates and guests attending this week's Republican National Convention in the carrier's Philadelphia hub. Those travelers had the ability to book special convention rates directly online by inputting a special meetings ID number available from their travel arranger. In the near future, US Airways will enable online booking of special fares for other meetings using the same procedure.

At Continental, distribution efforts generally have not focused on Web site access to negotiated rates. Instead, Jim Young, the carrier's managing director of distribution planning, said concepts such as FlightPay are being advanced. In fact, Young said one large corporate account actively is "investigating" FlightPay, Continental's pay-at-lift program, which will focus on high-frequency "shuttle-type" markets. Continental also has a direct connect relationship with E-Travel and is exploring a similar partnership with GetThere.

Meanwhile, both United and American said they are looking at the concept of direct Web site bookings for their corporate accounts, but have no tangible progress to report. In United's case, such a development would be a joint initiative between the sales team and the carrier's recently created individual e-commerce unit.

Delta's Caminiti tomorrow will again address NBTA delegates during his keynote lunch speech.