Industry Advances On Folio Data Project

The travel industry finally appears to be serious about resolving one of the most hotly debated topics of the 1990s--hotel folio data--dedicating time, and most importantly, resources to this issue.

Efforts to get hotels to pass through data to credit card companies range from task forces established by the American Hotel & Motel Association, the Association of Corporate Travel Executives and the National Business Travel Association, to individual efforts by card companies to get hoteliers to provide this data.

By April, the AH&MA's Hospitality Industry Technical Integration Standards advisory committee hopes to develop standards to ease the process of posting folio data to property management systems (<I>BTN</I>, Oct. 14, Dec. 16, 1996). However, it would then be up to vendors of various hotel property management systems, hotel owners and managers to upgrade their systems to the new standard and then add additional software to allow the folio data to flow to charge card companies. The industry also intends to raise more than $160,000 for the project by the end of 1998.

Meeting last month for the first time, the advisory committee identified four standards it wants to develop by 1998. At the top of the list is a standard to post folio data from point-of-sale terminals to property management systems, according to committee chairman Thierry Roch, vice president of industry relations for AH&MA. The group hopes to develop this standard before the AH&MA's annual meeting in April. Following the meeting, the group expects to issue standards to post restaurant transactions to PMS. Later in the year, the group wants to issue a standard for call accounting and telecommunications systems. Standards targeted for development next year include one to link central reservation systems to property management systems and another to link purchasing and inventory systems.

Industry consultant Larry Chervenak of Chervenak, Keane & Co., New York, estimates that standards like this can save millions of dollars for the industry. There are more than 100 different property management systems and more than two dozen systems they can integrate to, Chervenak said. Every time a hotel wants a new interface, it can cost upwards of $1,500 for programming changes.

"Inexplicably, as we approach the end of the 20th century, there are no widely agreed-upon standards that exist for the interconnection of computerized systems and subsystems within the hospitality industry," the AH&MA stated in detailing the reason for its initiatives.

This issue reached the front burner as the hotel industry began to reinvest in technology--now that hotels are profitable again--and are increasingly moving to client-server/Windows-based systems. Technology is making it easier to develop standards today and will help save members the cost of changing their systems to accommodate new interfaces later.

To speed the standard development process, the AH&MA is developing a hyperlink to its Website, allowing each committee to prepare a technical draft for each standard. A technical writer will work on the drafts for presentation at the subcommittee's second meeting on March 7, where members are expected to approve the draft, Roch said. By the group's third meeting on April 15, Roch expects the first standard to be approved and sent to the advisory committee to garner industry support.

"We're hoping to get the attention of corporate CEOs as soon as the standards are written," Roch said. "We hope all vendors will be so wowed by the amount of fanfare on the need for technical standards that they'll update their systems quickly."

Meanwhile, in the corporate travel world, a 40-member industrywide task force formed by ACTE and NBTA is slated to meet March 12 in Dallas to offer progress reports from their subcommittees: one developing a survey to learn what data elements travel buyers need, a second charged with looking at the technological issues of passing data through to credit card vendors and a third developing a white paper on reference terms.

Individually, credit card firms are trying to tackle this issue on their own as well. American Express recently dedicated one person, Jonathan Sibley, to this task. After working for several years with selected chains to secure room night and rate data, Amex is finally getting the critical mass necessary to generate a new report summarizing some of the data.

MasterCard's Pat Coll, president of the Carlson-Household joint venture, said he is "fostering the agenda quite aggressively" on adding to the 635 addendum record requirement--specific data elements that MasterCard has identified for each merchant segment, including airlines, hotel companies and car rental vendors. In addition, Dallas-based First USA Paymentech is trying to convince its merchants to pass through additional data, such as daily hotel and car rates and room nights.