H-P Implementing Online Booking For All U.S. Travelers
<B>H-P Implementing Online Booking For All U.S. Travelers</B>
By Cheryl Rosen
After a highly successful rollout of GetThere.com's online booking system at Hewlett-Packard's VeriFone division, Dorian Stonie and the H-P travel management team now are taking the technology to all H-P travelers.
Stonie six months ago became H-P's Internet travel technology manager, charged with simultaneously keeping an eye on VeriFone and piloting a bigger rollout of the GetThere system at H-P itself. The nation's twelfth largest travel buyer, H-P in 1998 had a U.S.-booked air volume of $180 million and a total T&E tab of $800 million (<I>BTN,</I> Aug. 16, 1999).
Even without Stonie's presence in the travel office, and with no corporate mandates or incentives, VeriFone has been maintaining an online adoption rate of about 75 percent for the past year, and savings on average ticket costs are running at 15 percent. Agent productivity has doubled. "Literally," Stonie said, "seven out of every 10 tickets going out the door are bought on the Web."
His hope now is to "aggressively implement on a much larger scale" for all of H-P--and that's not going to be an easy task. H-P's historically unconsolidated purchasing program already has four separate reservation engines--one for VeriFone, one for travelers who book through American Express, one for those who book through WorldTravel Partners and one for its new Agilent spinoff. A site for its third domestic agency, Carlson Wagonlit Travel, is in the works.
Still, Stonie's goal is to expand the pilot he began last month and get online access to all U.S. travelers before the year is out. "We're moving to full rollout as part of our e-commerce strategy, an initiative of our new CEO Carly Fiorina," he said. "It's reflective of the overall company push toward technology. We are reevaluating all our processes to leverage technology to improve cost and increase productivity. And technology is driving the travel industry today."
Stonie and the H-P team have loaded 60,000 traveler profiles and seen 10 percent of tickets move to the Web with virtually no marketing. Still, Stonie and Fiorina clearly expect more. "From the corporate perspective, the travel agency perspective and the traveler perspective, booking online has been a definite improvement, and we are going to be aggressively pursuing utilization," he said.
Stonie already has seen one new challenge as Internet booking systems expand within corporations: the question of internal versus external first-level support--or more simply, whom does a traveler call for help first? Where the VeriFone travel department handled support for its booking system, that simply is not possible as usage grows across H-P's mammoth global user base. Indeed, he said, that's an issue many travel managers are facing now, or soon will.
"Often you can handle support internally while you are in pilot, but as you get to 20, 30 or 40 percent usage, the question is whether you have the resources," said Stonie. "And these systems are available 24-seven. Can you handle a traveler at 2 a.m.? As programs start increasing, many corporations are looking at third-party support. As programs grow, outsourcing technical support can be cost-effective and provide enhanced levels of service for travelers.