Hotel Co. Automates RFPs - 2005-06-20

Travel buyers submitting requests for proposals to Cendant Hotels Group can expect less lag time for responses as the company this month launched an automated RFP system across its brands, giving worldwide franchisees at nearly 6,400 hotels the ability to more easily and quickly respond to RFPs.

Cendant Hotels Group, which includes the Days Inn, Ramada, Travelodge, Howard Johnson, Knights Inn, Wingate Inn and AmeriHost Inn brands, worked with Arlington, Texas-based travel RFP provider Lanyon Inc. to replace a paper-based process and leverage a system that automatically reviews RFPs and displays pricing.

Cendant said the system will "complete 90 percent of the response and forward the nearly completed form to franchisees to complete the remaining 10 percent, which allows them to control the process and ensure they provide up-to-date submissions."

"Our new process has taken a tedious task for our franchisees and made it very easy," said Tim Hamid, Cendant Hotel Group vice president of worldwide sales. "They can now take advantage of a very valuable source of revenue in less than half the time."

Hamid said the new RFP module is housed on the company's intranet for franchisees. Hamid said Cendant for months worked with Lanyon to map the National Business Travel Association hotel RFP format into the automated system and is encouraging clients to use that format to ensure speedy response times. Yet, Hamid said most companies already rely solely on the NBTA format when submitting requests.

"In terms of percentages, it doesn't even show up," Hamid said of alternative RFP use. "We try to encourage customers to adapt to the NBTA format, and if they insist on using another format, we can customize for that."

Hamid said Cendant in the past had struggled to ensure franchises would respond in a timely manner to RFPs. "It was very complicated because of our business model," he said. "We've been wrestling with this for a while. There were delays. Our customers and the hotels were getting frustrated."

Yet, Hamid said that since the company is automating the process and replacing paper-based RFPs—which typically average about 20 pages—"the timeline in response to the customer is getting shorter and shorter."

Hamid said Cendant would continue to use human involvement to push timeliness. "The franchises get alerted from the time the RFP go out to them," he said. "If a hotel is procrastinating on a response, we get on their case. The alerts keep coming to them all the time."