<B>Midsize Cos. Push Online</B>
By Cheryl Rosen
<I>Dallas</I> - The focus on pushing up the adoption rates of online booking systems is heading downstream, as midsize corporations realize that to achieve real savings, they will have to at least give their travelers a gentle nudge toward self-service travel booking.
In the first of a series of customer forums on technology that McCord Travel Management will be holding around the country, a panel of midmarket online booking pioneers yielded insights into the varying paths travel managers are taking--from benign neglect to formal change management programs all the way to simply saying, "You will use it or else."
Taking the latter course is Tokyo Electron America Inc. of Austin, Texas, whose Japan-based management was impressed by the 90 percent-plus adoption rates its neighbor, Motorola Asia, achieved after it mandated the use of Sabre BTS (<I>BTN</I>, Aug. 2, 1999).
"Motorola was a key selling factor," said travel manager Kevin Maguire, who took credit for suggesting the mandate to Tokyo Electron's senior management. "The Japanese are comfortable doing whatever Motorola does."
But Maguire also noted that mandates are part of the company's corporate culture. "We have a history of mandates--a mandated travel policy and a mandated expense-reporting system," he said. "I showed our management examples of other companies that had not mandated online booking, and said that the 10 or 20 percent usage they were getting wasn't good enough--and we weren't going to get more without a mandate." (For more on mandating online booking, see story, page 1).
Alcon Laboratories, now in the middle of a 90-day pilot of Xtra On-Line, is taking the opposite approach. Though owned by Nestlé, Alcon is "a family-type company; we don't even have a travel policy," said J. Ross McBride, director of corporate administrative services for the Fort Worth, Texas-based optical company best known for its contact lenses. "I'm looking at McCord to be my partner, to help me change behavior." He also is bolstering the agency's ability to persuade with a little touch of reality. Travelers will be shown the price of their travel bookings, so they see for themselves the bottom-line difference between a booking made online and one made on the phone.
With an increasingly global customer base expected to push the company's annual air spend from $8 million in 1999 to $11 million this year and $18 million in 2001, McBride hopes automated booking will help mitigate the need to hire more travel agents. "I don't have any more space for them to sit," he said.
Hewitt Associates LLC of Lincolnshire, Ill., is focused on developing a thorough change-management plan, and Sue Holt is doing hers internally, without the help of her agency. That's not surprising for a company whose expertise is in human resources management. At Hewitt, Holt said, "We may sell the concept, we may coerce, but we do not mandate."
In pilot since September, the GetThere system already has hit about a 20 percent adoption rate among Hewitt travelers, and the firm now plans a rollout to 4,300 travelers and a slew of administrative assistants across North America.
Meanwhile, Valerie Richards, facilities manager for Dade Behring Inc. of Deerfield, Ill., hopes to move 25 percent of the company's $12 million annual air volume to Sabre BTS without a mandate as the system moves into full deployment on March 1. "We mandated the SAP expense reporting system, but we're going to see how it goes before trying to mandate online booking," she said. "First we'll try to get penetration without a mandate. And truly, I'm surprised at how well it's been received so far."
Dayton, Ohio-based NCR Corp.--the largest company in the group, with an annual U.S.-based air volume of about $35 million--is expecting to charge back the cost of every booking to the individual traveler, and U.S. travel operations manager Andy Tellers expects that "will be the biggest agent of change." In addition, the travel office will host "pumping-up sessions, where we get a group of travelers together to talk about how we want them to use the system." NCR has been testing E-Travel since September, and is now ready for a larger rollout.
Tellers has been surprised at the ready adoption he has seen among travelers, especially "with the little promotion we have done." Though he acknowledged that formal presentations to the finance staff and the company's administrative assistants surely helped.
The McCord panel also offered insights into the technology rollout process with their responses to the question, "What didn't your online booking supplier tell you that you wish you had known before you got started?"
"I wish they had said more about the time and the people we would need to implement this, and the need to have a champion in senior management," said NCR's Tellers. "The whole sales cycle doesn't look at fulfillment, at what the agency has to do in the end. I wish I could have seen a video of the agency fulfilling an online reservation. I wish I'd known more about that process."
Agreed Richards, "McCord was very honest with us in terms of the resources we would need, but I don't think the vendors were. I can't tell you how labor-intensive some of the processes--like loading profiles--were."
But it was Alcon's McBride whose advice for other travel managers really seemed to come from the heart. With a new CEO who apparently is enthusiastic about travel management and technology, Alcon now is rolling out not only online booking, but also its first-ever corporate card program (with U.S. Bank) and automated expense system (Concur).
McBride's tip: "For damn sure, don't do it all at the same time.