Profiles In Travel Management - 2006-03-20

Pioneering A Traveler-Tracking Tool

Company: Kenneth Cole Productions

Headquarters: New York and Secaucus, N.J.

U.S. Booked Air: Less than $12 million



Kenneth Cole Productions recently reaped benefits from a reevaluation of traveler safety that led the company to pioneer Ultramar Travel Management's traveler tracking program.

"The technology that Ultramar came up with made traveler tracking a much better process," said Harry Kubetz, senior vice president of operations at Kenneth Cole, of the TMC's customizable traveler information dashboard. "At a glance, you see where the entire population of travelers are at any moment in time: future trips, current trips, past trips. It can be sorted by date, by traveler, by location. If there was some kind of event that came to our attention, we are able to see who is there and/or where they are staying. I can sign into the system and immediately see all of the information I need. There's nothing I have to do other than look at the information. Ultramar has done a great job of making the system very usable."

Kenneth Cole now ensures that travelers can communicate with the company at all times, be it with handheld devices or cell phones. Additionally, Ultramar last month announced a partnership with IJet Intelligent Risk Systems to provide clients with travel intelligence, destination reports and emergency response services, as well as traveler-tracking and communication capabilities.

"We've more or less gone from almost no ability to track travelers because we had a decentralized booking system, to a centralized booking system but with a manual way to track them, to a fully automated way to track travelers," said Kubetz, a 10-year employee of the fashion apparel and accessory company who manages and negotiates the entire travel program with Ultramar.

Kubetz said travel at Kenneth Cole previously was handled more informally than it is today. "We did not have a single travel management company. We had one that many of our corporate people used, but frequently, employees used either their own travel agencies or booked travel on their own. We were not well-organized from a corporate perspective in terms of travel."

After Sept. 11, 2001, Kubetz found himself fielding phone calls from frantic family members, wondering if their relatives were traveling. "A good answer to that wouldn't have been, 'I have no idea,' " Kubetz said. "Fortunately, we were never at that point. We're quite high touch and we had visibility of itineraries, but not in an automated way. That really did teach us a lesson in terms of having that information at our fingertips—where our travelers are and how they could be contacted."

In early 2002, another lesson came when an employee fell fatally ill with viral myocarditis while on business in Dongguan, China. Though Kubetz declined to discuss the case, New York magazine in 2003 reported that the employee visited a hospital for treatment of flu-like symptoms. A nurse provided by the factory she was working with remained with her, but neither Kenneth Cole nor any family members were notified of that visit. The employee died at the hospital.

In 2003, Kenneth Cole selected Ultramar as its travel management company and Kubetz joined Ultramar's travel advisory board, working with other Ultramar clients to help design and beta-test a traveler-tracking product Kenneth Cole would later become the first to deploy. Initially, Kubetz suggested the new tool include "res mail"—e-mail with a traveling employee's itinerary. Ultramar produced the service, but Kubetz still had to manually manage the res mail via an Excel file for easier visibility and sorting capabilities. "It was a lot of work and a lot of entry," Kubetz said.

Ultramar enhanced and automated the process by providing travel managers with real-time data on travelers as well as regular daily updates on events that may impact traveling employees. Consolidating with one travel management company also reduced Kenneth Cole's cost per seat mile by 29 percent and gave the company leverage to negotiate corporate rates. The company's online adoption rate is about 35 percent, Kubetz said, the product of a high-touch program that he acknowledged may cost more on a transactional basis but produces better savings in the long run.

"We at Kenneth Cole buck trends: While we encourage people to use online tools to get information about availability and fares, we actually encourage throughout the program the use of intelligent and knowledgeable agents," he said. "No matter how good online tools may be, they don't necessarily direct the traveler into making the right financial decision. Having a smart and tuned-in agent involved with the transaction gives a lot more opportunity for alternative routing, dates and times that can save a lot of money."

Kubetz said with more knowledge of security and health threats, his company is more vigilant than before. "We're much more cognizant and proactive about our travelers," he said. "We're looking at a lot more things today than people did in the past."