In December 2012, a few months before embarking on an "open booking" trial, Financial Industry Regulatory Authority Inc. manager of corporate travel services Carol McDowell joked with attendees at an industry event in New York: "I don't know whether I've opened Pandora's box," she said, "and I might be seeking another job six months from now."
McDowell laid out the broad plan for what at the time was to be a six-month pilot to determine whether open booking, as the concept has become popularly known, could work in conjunction with a managed travel program.
Attendees peppered her with questions: How will you track travelers? What about duty of care? Will this damage supplier relationships and discounts?
While she didn't know the answers at the time, many months later she sees value—or at least no harm—in further expanding the contentious travel management philosophy.
After one year of piloting the concept with 20 travelers at FINRA—a private company that serves as an independent regulator of financial securities firms—McDowell has concluded a few things. Travelers, when allowed to roam outside of gated corporate booking tools, haven't abused the system, she said. Also, they didn't spend more than the rest of the organization's travelers, on average and when controlled for access to supplier discounts.
In fact, McDowell is looking for ways to expand the program beyond the ongoing pilot. But, before she does, back-end and midoffice automation is required, negotiated discounts must somehow be made accessible via supplier sites, and a model must be established to address the servicing of reservations sourced outside the travel management company channel.
In other words, FINRA may be ready to expand open booking—but the industry, as McDowell sees it, isn't quite there.
The Pilot
McDowell is not a travel management naysayer. "I've been in the travel industry for 25-plus years, the majority of that on the TMC side," she said in December 2012. "I am 1,000 percent behind managed travel, but I see my job as having two goals. One is the safety of our travelers, and the other is to manage the spend. I've come to wonder: Do I need to manage the process of booking in order to accomplish those two goals? I'm not convinced that I need to."
To test that hypothesis, McDowell structured a program in which a small population of travelers would be free to book outside company channels—provided they follow a few directives.
Stressing that "this is still a managed program," she said pilot participants are beholden to the company travel policy, including spending guidelines, with the only difference being "they're allowed to book anywhere they want."
Well, almost anywhere. While pilot participants can take their corporate travel business to online travel agencies, meta-search tools and supplier websites, booking through FINRA's TMC and online tool expressly are prohibited, "because that would muddy the data," McDowell said.
Using those sites, pilot participants still must pay with their corporate card and file expenses through the appropriate tool.
McDowell also requires pilot participants to "relay the information to us as quickly as possible," using TripIt for centralized itinerary capture. They are required as well to participate in regular surveys to give feedback on their experiences and sentiments.
Kicking off in February 2013, the pilot initially was set for six months, but, "Once we got to the six-month mark, I really wanted to continue it," McDowell said recently, more than a year into the program. "I thought the results showing at that point were positive, and I really wanted to continue and try to take this program to the next phase."
The Findings
To measure whether travelers are booking rates comparable to those available through company channels, FINRA checks booked reservations against program rates as soon as travelers submit confirmation details. "We go into our online tool and look at, for those same flights, what we would have paid if they had booked through [FINRA's designated booking tool] Concur," McDowell said. "Then, also benchmark, if it wasn't on our preferred supplier, what the rate would have been if it were."
Based on data captured for one year, from February 2013 through January 2014, McDowell found that pilot participants booked 63 percent of their airline tickets on company-preferred airlines. "The ones that were not, the majority of those I would have approved anyway had they gone through the regular system," she said. "What they chose was, for instance, a regional carrier where it would not have impacted any of our airline agreements. They were making really good decisions."
As far as airfare pricing, 26 percent of tickets were "lower in fare than what they would have gotten through the regular channels," but McDowell noted that "a lot of that was because they took a low-cost carrier" or, in other instances, the traveler opted to depart from an alternate airport or endure a connection.
"Out of all the tickets, there was only one where we found that the person saved a lot of money, and I think it was one of those anomalies where they just happened to book it at the right time and grabbed it," she said. "I think that kind of puts to bed people saying, 'I can find better rates out there.' That was one of the questions going into this, and I didn't see that—only the one instance."
Yet, 54 percent of tickets booked by the pilot group "were actually a higher fare, but that was because we couldn't get our discounts through vendor websites. If I can find an automated way to get those discounts, that would be a wash."
For the remaining 20 percent of airline bookings, pilot participants "found the same fare" as what would have been booked through company-sanctioned channels.
"In essence, if we can get our corporate discounts through the vendor website, we would have seen a small net savings," McDowell noted. "But our actual results were basically a wash" on the airline side.
As for hotels, "it was almost 50-50 that the reservation was with one of our preferreds, but if they were not with one of our preferred individual properties, most of those were still with preferred chains."
In some ways the pilot validates the very program McDowell was asking participants to sidestep. "What they learned from it was that our negotiated rates with hotels are really pretty good, because for them to get something at that same price, they had to reduce the level of type of hotel they were staying at."
As for ground transportation, "it was a wash because the majority made reservations with our preferred car rental companies or car services. But, those discounts are open for them to use on a personal basis anyway, so there was really no difference in pricing for that."
Meanwhile, regarding looking and booking behaviors, McDowell found that, at first, travelers would go to aggregators, including meta-search sites or online travel agencies, "to do their research." Yet, they were more likely to book on supplier-direct websites.
"As time went on, they kind of knew which airline would have the best or most service for their cities. So, after time, they wouldn't go back to Expedia or Kayak."
Even so, as bookings took place, McDowell found that on average travelers for each trip were making "about 2.2 reservations, because they're doing air, hotel and car separately."
In Need Of Automation
At the start of the pilot, McDowell instructed participants to send travel confirmations to TripIt, the itinerary capture tool owned by Concur. "The idea was that the participants, once they had a confirmation, would send it to TripIt, then my project assistant and I would, as administrators, be able to go into the system and see what they booked."
Yet, McDowell noted that "the level of detail that we needed" wasn't fully captured in the tool. "After that first week, we decided to still have them send it to TripIt—because I do see the value of our travelers having all of their itinerary pieces in one confirmation—but we also added that they email it to my project assistant," she said.
This was the first of many manual processes. With those itinerary details in hand, McDowell or her project assistant then re-enters trip details into FINRA's traveler-tracking software. (McDowell stressed this point, as critics of open booking often question how a company using the concept can preserve duty-of-care responsibilities.)
Even beyond traveler tracking, McDowell seeks more automation, including data feeds into travel management company systems, "because I do believe in the value of the TMC," she reiterated.
"If we can get the data to our travel management company, then they can assist our travelers in case of an emergency, and we can also capture the data so it's in our TMC reports," she said.
"Also, the TMC could be the mechanism for tracking unused tickets. So, I still see huge value for the TMC in this process."
Additionally, McDowell would like to see direct data feeds for non-program bookings put into the expense reporting system to streamline the process for travelers.
Supplier Relations
Also begging for automation: the ability to access corporate rates when "booking directly on the vendor's website," McDowell said.
Indeed, structuring an open-booking environment in a more seamless way requires rethinking how buyers, intermediaries and suppliers interact. More often than not, suppliers are open to exploring such an environment, McDowell has found.
FINRA is operating under an extension with American Express Global Business Travel, but last year tested the waters with a TMC bid.
"In the bid process, we did bring to the table that we would potentially want them to be involved with open booking and be able to service that, and every single bidder said, 'Absolutely, we're willing to do that.' As we got to the shorter list, the TMCs were coming up with ideas on how they could do that. At least the companies we're talking to are definitely open to it and are looking for a client to be able to do a model with."
McDowell also is getting good responses from travel suppliers, as the company struggled to find a solution to access FINRA corporate rates on supplier-direct channels.
"Our hotels and car services are all good with it, and even our airline partners are considering the idea," she said. "I think they're trying to determine how to do it and what kind of technology investment they would have to make."
McDowell is hopeful that a third-party software provider might bridge many of the program automation needs with minimal supplier investment, though a full-on solution remains to be seen.
To that end, she is testing a software solution from an undisclosed firm to "automate parts of what is currently a manual process."
"If we do decide to take this to a larger group, we're going to have to have that in place in order to manage it," she said.
'All For It'
Travelers at times also are frustrated by a lack of automation, especially when it comes to filing expense reports and accessing corporate rates on the wide-open web.
On expense reports, booking information when transacted through company-furnished channels "would have been prepopulated previously," but now the travelers themselves found new manual steps in the process, as they would "have to attach invoices or itineraries or receipts," McDowell said.
When travelers know a corporate rate is available for, as an example, a hotel, it often is not accessible online and requires a phone call to the hotel to complete the reservation. "If they made it online, they'd call the hotel to get the FINRA rate, because that was not available on the website," said McDowell. "So, that's been frustrating. We did work with some of our hotel partners where they allowed us to give our travelers our discount code. Then they can put that into the website to get that rate."
While McDowell strived to keep the pilot group set at 20 travelers, there is ebb and flow over the course of the test. Some travelers left the company, while others took on new roles that required less travel. McDowell said that as travelers fall out of the program, others are waiting in line to participate.
Even with some criticism, travelers warmly have received the open-booking program. "The bottom line is that [participants] do want it to continue and they would like to see us expand it and resolve some of these things, like get discounts at vendor websites," said McDowell. "They're all for it."
Still, she also finds that pilot participants "like to have the option to use our online tool or agency."
Next Steps
For now, FINRA has maintained the program as a 20-traveler pilot. Pending some automation solutions, TMC work and supplier fixes, McDowell sees an opportunity to expand it, perhaps into a companywide option.
But first, "We need to be able to get that data into the traveler-tracker program, the TMC, the expense tool and mirror everything that happens on the traditional booking," she said.
McDowell sees the open-booking concept as complementary to a managed travel program, an option available to travelers should they choose it.
"Once everything is in place, I see this as becoming something like a trusted-traveler program," she said. "You know these people are going to make the right decisions. They're frequent travelers, they know what they're doing, they follow the rules. If this is how they prefer to do it and it makes them happy—and I can still do my job and we're still managing the spend—then why not let them do it?"
Pending technology and supplier buy-in, she just might.
This report originally appeared in the May 2014 edition of Travel Procurement.