Corporate Intranet Travel Sites To Alter Negotiating
<B>Corporate Intranet Travel Sites To Alter Negotiating</B>
By David Meyer, Editor-in-Chief
Online travel management tools will be in place at most companies of any significant size within the next year, reshaping the business travel negotiating table in a way that improves the position of the corporate travel buyer.
These tools will reduce costs over time, but more importantly they will arm the buyer with a new level of information that will empower companies and individual travelers to strike better deals and get better service.
Evidence that the early adopter phase has come to an end as the online travel management era reaches critical mass lies in two recent Business Travel News surveys. One survey, conducted as part of BTN's annual Corporate Travel 100 Benchmarking Summit in March, shows the level of deployment of online booking and expense reporting among the largest buyers of business travel services. A more general appraisal of the state of system deployment came from a poll of the Association of Corporate Travel Executives members who logged on to a BTN questionnaire at the Cyber Café at the association's recent annual meeting (<I>BTN,</I> April 24).
Both surveys show that online booking and expensing systems already have been deployed at a substantial percentage of corporations, and that most companies will have these tools in place once those who intend to implement the systems in the coming year do so.
In fact, the 50 travel buyers who completed the Corporate Travel 100 survey and the 94 travel buyers who responded to the ACTE survey were remarkably in agreement. Half of the respondents said that they have online booking systems in place already and slightly less than half said they have online expense processing systems in place. For the 30 percent of Corporate Travel 100 companies that don't reimburse out of policy purchases, 80 percent already have online booking systems implemented.
For the Corporate Travel 100, when it comes to online booking, 30 percent are in the process of buying and implementing systems and another 18 percent will have one by next year. For online expense reporting, 16 percent are in the process of buying and implementing systems and 22 percent will have one by next year.
One-third of the ACTE respondents expect to implement online booking, expense reporting and end-to-end systems on their corporate intranets in the coming year. One-fourth said they already have end-to-end travel management systems installed on their corporate intranets.
Both samples were taken from buyers with the most clout, experience and technological savvy because they are the industry's leading edge, yet the rest of the market is not too far behind.
In the short term, these systems promise buyers as well as suppliers substantial savings in terms of processing costs. In the long term, they will contribute to the development of a powerful new distribution platform
As e-commerce moves rapidly toward commoditizing the airline ticket, the corporate intranet will empower business travel buyers to have more control over how much their travelers use specific suppliers and at what price. It will be a conduit for information for travelers, travel management, senior management and suppliers that can help ensure rate integrity, raise service levels on a corporatewide and personal basis, and streamline the bid process.
The implementation of automated travel systems on the corporate intranet in and of themselves may not be a panacea for business travel buyers, but the current corporate rush toward the online environment promises more dramatic changes in the near future for the practice of travel management.