<B> Small Mtgs. Go Hi-Tech</B>
<I>Pegasus, Hilton, Hyatt Cooperate On Automating Groups Up To 50</I>
By Cheryl Rosen
Dallas - Two hotel companies and two travel managers are helping build the specs for a Pegasus Systems pilot project designed to automate one of the travel industry's most difficult to consolidate tasks: the booking of small meetings.
With the help of this small but knowledgeable committee--including travel buyers Hanna Murphy of Siemens and Earl Foster of Seagram, plus representatives of Hilton and Hyatt--Pegasus by next year hopes to produce a small meetings booking system that will allow planners to search hotel databases for blocks of up to 50 rooms, to hold space for up to 24 hours, and self-book the rooms.
"We've been booking transient travel direct with Sheraton using Pegasus's THISCO switch since March 1998, and so we started looking at ways to book small meetings, especially 'hot dates,' the same way," Murphy said. "We don't have a central meetings department, so I said I wanted to get a system out there for our admins so they don't call their friends or the hotel around the corner when they have a meeting to plan, but put all their requirements on an official form. I saw this as a way to communicate clearly, streamline the process and be more professional."
In addition, Murphy hopes that the imperative to spell out the contract details in writing in advance will help guide novice planners through the questions they need to be asking meeting sponsors and push them toward preferred suppliers. While many Siemens meetings are held at preferred hotels--including Best Western, Holiday Inn, Radisson and Starwood--there are the inevitable times when credit card spending data includes properties not included on that list, she acknowledged.
"I believe that if we can give the admins the pleasure of planning a meeting but also give them a format to follow, with all the questions defined and answered, it's going to be a very good program," she said.
Indeed, Murphy is pushing to have a beta version of the system in place before the end of this year. "I'd rather start with something and then tweak it as we go along than wait and wait and wait until it's all done," she said.
<B>Seagram Signs On</B>
At Joseph E. Seagram & Sons in New York, where the total meetings spend comes to about $50 million annually, "our planners are going nuts, so I'm really interested in using technology to help," said global travel management director Earl Foster. "There's not a lot out there that works in the meetings arena--and certainly nothing that puts it all together. This is a great opportunity, and our people are embracing the idea of having a way to improve the process."
The serendipitous timing of the technology release, just as Seagram puts together its first serious attempt to consolidate and manage meetings purchases (see story, page 31) gives Foster more hope for a superior showing than he had originally expected, he said. Having both a full-time meetings program manager and a small meetings booking tool "is going to make people flock to the program," he predicted.
Pegasus president and CEO John Davis, meanwhile, is focusing on building the system itself. "If my secretary wants to set up a board meeting for 15 rooms, it takes her three days on the phone. That's absurd," he said. "In the segment of 50 rooms or less, we ought to be able to check hot dates that are available by geographic location--say, 20 rooms in Scottsdale in March--and send the details of the meeting to the hotels."
Once the contract is signed, the system would turn the room block over to the planner, and individual attendees could book their own rooms within the block over the Internet.
The system would respond to inquiries automatically, sending out pre-packaged contracts and allowing planners to book their space and without the intervention of the hotel sales office. Pegasus plans to make the software freely available to the industry through Internet and corporate booking systems
While in theory that sounds relatively simple, hotels will have to agree to modify their reservation systems to allow outsiders to query whether 50 rooms are available. "That's normally not a question hotels want to respond to publicly," Davis noted.
The hotels also must agree to hold the space for 48 hours, while contracts are prepared, read and signed. The hotel then will change the room block to a "booked" status and give the planner and attendees access to the block so they can make their own reservations within the space.
Davis said the current plan is to offer access through a unique URL address. The planner would send attendees an e-mail "and say here's the info, click here to book."
For now, the hotel sales office will get the RFP, check the dates and send back a response, but the hope is that "one day we'll automate that too."
"We do think this is achievable and can be done in our lifetime--or rather, in an Internet lifetime--absolutely in the year 2000," Davis said.
Once the system is complete, Davis said he will share it with online meeting sites like Passkey.com, for which Pegasus provides booking capabilities, as well as with other interested parties in the corporate market.
"We're not developing this for the exclusive use of Pegasus," he said. "We fully envision this tool being used by all providers of software to the corporate market. It's a low-cost way for hotels to sell rooms and for small meetings planners to find space. The Passkeys of the world are providing a great way to book citywide meetings, but no one is addressing the needs of the small meetings market."
For now, though, there are still issues to be ironed out--specifically, developing a way to book more than one person in a room, and how to include travel agencies in the process, Davis acknowledged. Payment was another thorny question, solved for now by requiring a credit card number for every booking, though the plan is to eventually change to central billing.
<B>Hyatt, Hilton Check In</B>
At Hyatt, meanwhile, vice president of electronic distribution Joan Lowell acknowledged that she clearly is " looking for a way for small meetings to use the availability and information of the Web. It's very difficult and challenging for us because there are a number of sites and no one really knows how valuable they are to meeting planners. I don't think major meetings are going to benefit from being booked online--it's those small meetings that are under 50 rooms, that are more departmental, that fall between the cracks. It's a very hard process to call around, get prices and pull those together, so there's an advantage to being able to at least check availability and price, and direct traffic to them."
Hilton's Bruce Rosenberg also is excited about the prospect of using Web-based technology to help both hotel salespeople and corporate planners simplify the process--so excited that it dwarfs the hotel industry's long-standing concern over giving users direct access to its inventory. And he expressed little concern over holding space for 24 hours while potential customers solidfy their contracts.
"Hilton gets thousands of small meetings a year--it's the lifeblood of a lot of hotels in the system, and if we could do it faster, we think we could get even more of it," Rosenberg said. "This will be a new process, but realistically, this stuff happens on a manual basis today--when a planner calls, the salesperson goes in and reserves the space while the customer is shopping. So it's just a question of letting the planners do it themselves."
In return, he said, an automated system "definitely would yield cost savings--the time involved alone would incur substantial savings for us. I think we can work through the issues."
While a lot of work remains to be done, "realistically, a lot of pieces already exist, and I look forward to having the product available in the first quarter of 2000," said Rosenberg.
As for his corporate customers, Rosenberg suggested they begin now thinking about ways to harness the emerging technologies and partner with hotels to simplify the process.
"Planners should be looking at how the Internet can help their business and giving feedback to their Hilton contacts about how they want to use the Internet," he said. "What we don't want is a hotel-driven process. The more they communicate the functionality they want us to develop, the more responsive we will be."
From the consumer end, the Internet already has proven to be a very viable distribution channel. We're beginning to drill down into targeted segments to see how it can work for them," he said. "If you have the right functionality, people will use it.
The industry seemed to welcome the effort to automate the small meetings booking process, if not necessarily endorsing the Pegasus solution.
Said American Express spokesperson Melissa Abernathy, "I couldn't comment on a system I haven't seen, but the idea of a small meetings booking tool obviously has some appeal." Still, she noted, Amex's main focus for AXI "is on getting more companies signed up and pushing up usage, so this would be a more distant priority." Even with a finished, turnkey system from Pegasus, "it takes an awful lot of resources to integrate a new feature, train the sales staff and get it up and running."
Sabre, as an investor in Passkey.com (BTN, Aug. 2), applauded any move toward broadening the scope of the meeting booking site. Said senior vice president of sales and marketing Scott Alvis, "Any automation of the group space or innovation that's good for Passkey is good for Sabre.