Oracle Spends Money To Improve Traveler Services

<H1> Oracle Spends Money To Improve Traveler Services</H1>By Cheryl Rosen

<I>Redwood Shores, Calif. </I>- Oracle Corp. has taken an unusual step in this era of cost-cutting, designating over half a million dollars to provide better service for travelers.

The move came after several years of thriftiness led to what employees believed was a decline in service. "Our annual air volume jumped from $15 million to over $50 million in the past five years, and the pressure has been to run the leanest machine and to focus on cost, cost, cost," said corporate travel manager Lisa Piniella Shively. "But our most frequent travelers began to feel that we were focusing too much on savings and not enough on them."

The new financing will be used to hire 14 more agents to staff the company's Gold Line hotline for frequent travelers-including four agents "whose sole responsibility will be getting passengers out of the center seat and calling hotels in sold-out situations"-and to purchase an automated booking system and a management reporting system. In addition, thanks to a program Shively worked out with American Express, headcount will be added to process temporary credits to individually billed American Express cards when travelers cancel airline tickets, so that their credit ratings are not affected while the airlines process the refunds.

Shively also is talking to Oracle's agency, Rosenbluth International, about using its Dacoda contract-maximizing system, "but we have not yet come to a full meeting of the minds on the bottom-line value of the system, or on what the cost should be," she said. Oracle has agreed to pay Rosenbluth a fee to run the Dacoda model for a few months "to identify the savings opportunities" and allow Shively to make a more informed decision. Should Oracle decide to go with the Dacoda system, its purchase will come from an additional funding approval and not from the current windfall, Shively said.

Shively's renewed focus on service comes as the result of the latest annual survey of Oracle's most frequent travelers, done this year via e-mail and netting a record-breaking 850 responses. While her travelers were "basically satisfied" with the travel program, they nonetheless sent a message that "they missed the special handling" they had received in the past. "We had maxed our agents to the point where they focused on getting the traveler on and off the phone-and our travelers said they needed more help and more attention," she said.

Even the Gold Line, founded about three years ago to service the company's top 150 travelers by providing faster call-answer time and reconfirming travel plans with suppliers every day, did not suffice. With the company's growth and increasingly global travel, only 20 percent of employees who travel every week qualified for the service.

The survey results were an eye-opener for Shively-and she took immediate action. "I learned that sometimes travel managers have to fight the good fight with the CFO," she said. "So I went to senior management and said, 'we need to spend some money.' "

The company will contribute $400,000 in cash to the travel department budget, and Shively expects an additional $200,000 to come from the savings generated by using the automated booking system. Every reservation booked electronically will save 50 percent off Rosenbluth's transaction fee-adding up to "a lot of money on 100,000 transactions," she said.

But even while the booking system contributes to the bottom line, Shively also considers it one more service for her travelers. "My consultants who go to the same city every week really want this," she said, "and they are already equipped with laptops." She hopes to have a system on board by Sept. 1-and is "pushing hard" for a Web-based booking product so travelers won't have to store it on their hard drives-"and so I don't have to send out 5,000 copies of the new system if we decide to change it," she said.