Hogg Robinson To Launch Meetings Mgmt. Unit
<B> Hogg Robinson To Launch Meetings Mgmt. Unit</B>
By Amon Cohen
Hogg Robinson, the company that manages and owns a large chunk of Business Travel International, is broadening its service offering and is inviting travel managers to do the same.
It is integrating the activities of its two divisions--corporate travel and financial services, especially insurance and pensions management. Hogg also is poised to launch a third division, covering event management. "The future lies in managing expenses around the edges, including travel-related services, such as events and meetings, and outsourced services from other sectors," said David Radcliffe, chief executive of both Hogg and BTI. "We are starting to use the same back-end systems not only for travel but also for areas such as healthcare and pensions."
Radcliffe adds that "some travel managers are moving in that direction as well. Those with senior level reporting, especially in procurement and finance, are very open to our selling them other products."
That bodes well for Hogg because Radcliffe predicts business travel volumes are set to fall once the ill wind of the Asian economic crisis blows into Europe. As happened during the Gulf War, that will focus minds on cost-containment with, he hopes, Hogg thriving as a complete expense management consultant.
The increasing integration of corporate activities on single systems also will aid the push in this direction towards a one-stop corporate services offering, he said.
Radcliffe denies he is constructing an imaginary trend of wider service management to fit his company structure. On the contrary, he has restructured Hogg to adapt to evolving client demands.
"I could easily have sold financial services and not developed event management," he said. "These are all sectors where companies traditionally spend on themselves. Travel management is all about providing information and so are the others. The key to them is to identify not what has been spent but what might be spent."
Such an approach "will become a trend for the rest of the industry but at the moment, Hogg Robinson is at the front of it," claimed Radcliffe.
With his other hat on, Radcliffe said BTI has moved far closer to being a single entity over the last two years than he had anticipated. The BTI brand has assumed priority over the original agency name in most countries, the most glaring exception being the home territory of the United Kingdom, where the Hogg name remains far stronger.
BTI claims its worldwide turnover is $20 billion and that Hogg Robinson in its own right is the world's third-largest travel agency, with annual income of $3 billion.
Hogg is either owner or majority shareholder of BTI in the United Kingdom, the Nordic countries, Italy, France, Russia, Australia and Canada. Most of the other important European markets are owned by Swiss leisure travel giant Kuoni, which also runs BTI in Germany, Austria, Liechtenstein and Hungary.
Radcliffe said his shareholders are eager for Hogg to acquire more parts of BTI but that 100 percent ownership of the network is not part of the strategy.
He acknowledged solid ownership is needed in key territories, however, and here the lack of integration with BTI Americas remains a major headache following Hogg's refusal to meet the asking price set by majority shareholder EDS. As a result, BTI Americas was instead sold to a management buyout team supported by WorldTravel Partners. How this will tie up with WTP's own network, Global Travel Management remains to be seen, but Hogg expects BTI to have a settled U.S. partner--which insiders say may well be Maritz Travel--within the next few weeks.