Hotel RFP Cos. Expand Product Lines And Reach

By Maria P. Vallejo / March 21, 1999

Hotel RFP Cos. Expand Product Lines And Reach

By Maria P. Vallejo

The 1999-2000 hotel negotiating season may be several months away but the time is now for corporate buyers who are seriously considering using electronic hotel requests for proposals to examine their options.

With many of the kinks having been worked out of electronic hotel RFPs during the previous two seasons, buyers now stand to gain from the groundwork of pioneers and are able to look at the track records of those companies that have been providing the software.

The three most prominent electronic RFP providers, JBH Travel Audit, Lanyon Inc. and Travelware Information Systems, have to date served dozens of companies, though each of them brings a different set of products and services to the table.

<CENTER>JBH Travel Audit</CENTER>

JBH Travel Audit, based in Denver, offers two products for the electronic market: RFP Prosource for travel managers planning to outsource their process to a third party, and Hotel RFP Solution, launched last year for hotel companies.

JBH acts as a mediator between the hotel company and the corporate buyer by collecting, checking and fitting bid information into the customer's database. The information can be received in a variety of ways, such as via a secured Web page or through the Prosource Viewer, according to Shelley Hanson, the company's manager of RFP operations.

"Though we do combine software with our service, we are very service based," Hanson said. "The information goes through a rigorous case of checking. Often when a hotel returns an RFP, there is incongruent information. Our system finds out what we need to get more information on."

The company endorses the use of the National Business Travel Association's standardized electronic RFP, but it also can accommodate customers' requests to include additional RFP questions that the individual corporation might want to ask bidders. These questions become an addendum to the standardized format.

When bids are returned, JBH's program systematically checks the hotel information by field to make sure that the properties followed the field requirements, such as length and character type. After the automated check, a manual inspection is done.

The Viewer sits on a desktop computer's C drive, and the system allows the travel manager to download and upload information using an Internet transmission. Unlike working directly off the Internet, this means the information is not live, so the user can manipulate the data without affecting the actual document.

To use the Web product, the customer accesses a secure, password-protected Web site.

From a 1996 customer base of just three corporate clients, JBH increased the number to 30 in 1997 and 35 last year. Its database includes hotel data from the first six sections of the NBTA standard form, and is used during negotiating season to verify bid information returned by the individual hotels.

JBH Travel last spring developed its newest product, Hotel RFP Solutions. It is made up of two components: Corporate Viewer, which sits on a desktop in a hotel national sales office and is accessible by all salespeople, and Webware, an Internet site where hotels can log into, review and update their RFP data.

The two components are connected by the JBH database that lists the basic NBTA standardized information provided by hotels. Hotels then only have to update price and buyer-specific information for each account rather than repeat the standard data for each RFP.

"The benefit for the hotel chains is that they only have to fill it out once," said Jessica O'Brien, JBH's manager of business services. After that, "it's only the pricing that changes. They can log into the hotel site, make changes to the basic information and log in their rates or specific information for a particular client."

Hotels are billed a tiered monthly rate, with prices per property decreasing as the number of properties enrolled per chain goes up. Individual properties that are not part of a chain are offered a standard fee.

<CENTER>Lanyon Inc.</CENTER>

Lanyon Inc., based in Arlington, Texas, is spreading its wings and reaching beyond its traditional travel agencies and consortia market, adding bid validation technology and embarking on a new three-phase project.

The validation technology prevents hotel companies from closing and sending out bids unless all the required fields specified by each individual corporate customer are completed correctly.

"You can't say enough about this validation stuff," said senior vice president Brad Fred. "We found that we needed quality control in the software that enforced information before it went out."

So far, Lanyon works with 40 hotel chains, 10,000 properties, 15 consortia and travel agents and one corporate customer.

Moving into the corporate travel arena, Lanyon has partnered with London-based Conduit Communications to customize the RFP process for corporate accounts.

"We're really trying to give everybody the options. We view the corporate relationship with the hotel company as key," Fred said. "It's really trying to tie in the corporate account with the hotels."

In phase two of its program, Lanyon plans to create a bookable Web-based directory of all the hotels and make it available online to travel managers. This technology will be ready this year, in time for the autumn negotiating season for corporate hotel directories being published for the year 2000. With the information always available, new properties can easily be added to the directory during the year. At the same time, the directory can act as a bookable Web site for negotiated rates.

Phase three, expected to begin in 2000, will move the RFP and hotel directory into a new realm, where Lanyon will track booking information and also help create automated expense reports.

<CENTER>Travelware Information Systems</CENTER>

Travelware, based in Culver City, Calif., offered its second version last year, providing buyers with more blank data fields to accompany the standardized RFP format, adding user mailboxes to its Web page and including reminder and to-do lists, said managing director Charles Kao.

More than two years ago, Travelware responded to the NBTA's request for development and circulation of a free RFP viewer that eventually was distributed at the association's national convention and through its Web site. The first draft of the product, Hotel RFP Manager, was targeted at corporate travel managers.

"The first year was going through a learning and education process for the target audience," Kao said. "The hoteliers were more driven by the corporate travel managers, who had some apprehension about the whole electronic process--what it was to be, how it was to benefit and what kind of computer expertise was needed to take advantage of it."

The problems encountered during those early months have faded through education and exposure, he said. Now, one of the most common travel manager complaints is that the NBTA standard format does not address the specific questions of individual companies, despite the 420 data fields it offers. To address this issue, Travelware has added additional blank fields that can be customized. "It's better for people to export the data that they receive and they can define the dozen or two dozen fields that they want to use," Kao said.

This year, the company is offering buyers mailboxes on the Travelware Web site that allow hotels to access RFPs and send their bids through the boxes. Kao expects the Internet version to eventually surpass the desktop version in usage because it further simplifies the process.

"Managing floppy disks and e-mail attachments can be very difficult. Here you don't have to download software; you just have to get online," he said.

Kao said that his company currently serves hundreds of travel agency and corporate customers.

<CENTER>The Future RFP: E-Commerce Ready</CENTER>

Beyond simplifying the current RFP process, these companies are helping move the industry to the next stage, the interactive or e-commerce stage, said Dan Geller, president of WizBizWeb E-Commerce Strategies, based in San Rafael, Calif.

"What we have is good, but it's not the ultimate answer," said Geller, who was director of national corporate travel sales for Sheraton and a member of the NBTA Hotel Electronic RFP Committee before his current role. "Still, it made people think about efficiency and helped the industry form a standard."

In Geller's vision of the future, standard RFP information will reside on a corporation's travel Web site, where hotels will be able to update their data in real time using a password. Some of the current electronic RFP companies may begin moving in this direction within the next year, but most likely the industry will go through this evolution over the next three to five years.

Until then, RFP providers will continuing refining their products and signing up additional corporate clients.

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