E-Booking Thrives In Norway
Stavanger, Norway - European corporations have been slow to warm to corporate online booking, but Norwegian oil company Statoil has proven a notable exception.
Statoil has achieved an adoption rate of 22 percent since starting to implement Amadeus' Corporate Traveller last February. For Quick Trips, the 150 city-pair templates that represent its most frequently traveled routes, the adoption rate is 32 percent. Statoil has 8,500 regular travelers alone working for the parent company in Norway.
Norway is proving to be a hotspot for online booking. The country's leading travel agency, Berg-Hansen, said it has 22 clients, in addition to Statoil, using a private-label version of Corporate Traveller, called Berg-Hansen Online. That is several more clients than GetThere has in the whole of Europe. This is partly due to strenuous efforts by Berg-Hansen, which now transacts 10 percent of its reservations online, despite not having a single client mandating the use of self-booking tools. Among the agency's innovations is profile synchronization of online and offline bookings. The other reason for success is that 53 percent of bookings in Norway are ticketed electronically, a much higher figure than is normal in Europe, thanks to the adoption of e-ticketing by both home-grown carriers, SAS and Braathens.
As is the case in the United States, Statoil is reaping several benefits through adopting online booking. It is saving approximately $11 per trip in agency fees and, even more crucially, policy compliance has improved, with usage of preferred hotels rising in particular. "In the end, this will provide greater savings than our travel agency costs," said Trygve Takle Pedersen, corporate travel manager for Statoil. Pedersen hopes to reduce process costs by saving time for travelers, but Statoil has not yet joined up Corporate Traveller to its SAP travel expense management solution, introduced in July 1999. At the time, Statoil lacked the resources to introduce online booking simultaneously, even though employees were accustomed to numerous SAP-related self-service applications, and even though Amadeus and SAP market an integrated booking and expense management system. As a result, travelers first have to enter the SAP system to generate a trip number and then paste the number into Corporate Traveller.
Pedersen and his colleague Magnus Fonnes, project manager for the SAP human resources solution within Statoil, intend to rectify this problem during 2002. When they do, they forecast that integrating the automated booking and expense management processes will save travelers several minutes per trip. Altogether, they expect the complete integrated process to save 30 minutes against the manual travel process the company had back in 1999. They also believe that full integration will cause adoption rates to shoot up.
Despite Statoil's impressive figures in European terms, Pedersen had hoped to achieve 40 percent to 50 percent by now. "It was easy to get the early adopters, but the rest have been hard," Pedersen said. "Six months ago, we were very optimistic, but we have not reached as far as we thought."
Statoil has backed its introduction of Corporate Traveller with a sustained communications campaign, starting with the 2,000 most frequent travelers. Information has been disseminated via the company intranet and a series of leaflets in the standard SAP fact-sheet style. There also have been questionnaires and prize drawings exclusively for those who book online. Berg-Hansen also smoothed the way for travelers by setting up their profiles in the system, meaning there was no need to register. However, the benefit of this has been undermined by the need to obtain the trip number from SAP.
Pedersen and Fonnes have identified several reasons that have inhibited adoption of the tool. One is the lack of a mandate, although they may well introduce an element of compulsion once the booking and expense management tools are integrated into a seamless system. In the meantime, whenever travelers attempt to book one of the Quick Trip city pairs on the telephone, the Berg-Hansen agent is instructed to ask if they would like to book online instead.
Though it currently goes against company culture to mandate, realization of the need to track personnel following the events of Sept. 11 is helping to change attitudes on the question of mandating.
That said, the pair are reluctant to mandate before they are satisfied that the system is close to perfect. One or two problems remain with Corporate Traveller, such as the way it tries to make the booker stay in the same hotel for the entire duration of a point-to-point itinerary.
Another inhibiting factor has been the lack of a prominent position for travel on the Statoil intranet. Pedersen is campaigning for a more central position on the company's home page. He also feels travelers need more convincing of the merits of booking online. In part, he "blames" Berg-Hansen reservations staff for being too good at their jobs.
"They answer their phones very efficiently," he said. Once again, Statoil corporate culture would not tolerate the U.S.-style tactic of building in a delay to all agency telephone calls.
Pedersen believes he has not yet made travelers understand the savings that online bookings can generate for the company. More fundamentally, employees are reluctant to make yet another change to their routines if they do not have to. "There are so many things happening in their work," he said.