Successful Booking, Expense Integration Still Elusive - 2007-11-19

Companies with a long history of using self-booking tools are finding it harder than late adopters to integrate them with expense management systems, according to Amadeus. Marcos Isaac, the company's director of corporate and distribution channels, said the problem is particularly acute in the United States, where online booking became widespread half a decade before it caught on in Europe and the concept of integration with expense management gained currency.

"North American companies that introduced self-booking tools five or more years ago are less integrated than European companies introducing them today," Isaac told BTN. "However, some of them are trying to integrate now because they have discovered they need to integrate with other processes to take out more costs."

Nancy Smith, PricewaterhouseCoopers' U.S. travel leader, concurred with Isaac's analysis. "Strategically, we want to integrate our online booking and expense management to improve efficiencies and reduce process costs, but it is not going to be done with the flick of a switch," she said. "The hardest challenge is that I don't want to take away anything from which travelers are receiving value. I don't have the answer yet, and my perception is that a lot of other buyers are in the same position. It will take a lot of strategic planning."

An Amadeus-commissioned survey of 168 buyer members of the Association of Corporate Travel Executives, released at ACTE's global conference in Munich last month, showed only 9 percent had integrated self-booking and expense management tools. However, another 12 percent said they have embarked on the process and Isaac expects the trend to accelerate.

The figures are low, even though respondents see clear benefits in bringing the two together. According to the survey, 62 percent anticipate a significant productivity gain from integration through reducing time spent on reporting travel expenses. Nearly the same number of respondents expected significant productivity gains from reducing the need for manual input of traveler data and automating the transfer of traveler profile data.

Isaac attributes the low incidence of current integration to the relative high cost of linking booking and expense management tools, compared with other integrations. The benefits are difficult to prove. "The case for introducing an SBT was easy to show to the boss, but if you want to integrate the end-to-end process, you need to show the cost savings all the way along the line," he said. "You have to dissect every single element and how much can be saved every time you fix an integration."

However, not all travel buyers are convinced the pain of integration is one worth enduring. "It's a nice-to-have, but it is not key," said Peter Brodbeck, head of global travel for Syngenta Crop Protection. "If travelers want to do their expenses, they need what they really paid."

After a pilot scheme, Siemens also concluded "it is not the right direction for us," said Sabine Sehrt, the company's vice president of international travel management. Rules governing expenses vary significantly in each country. Sehrt said the added complexity in 80 different countries would be difficult to persuade each national business to accept.

The Amadeus survey, carried out by the United Kingdom's Cranfield University, also revealed that 30 percent of respondents had integrated their booking tool with a human resources database and 56 percent had integrated it into their corporate intranet, which can help to improve adoption by making processes easier for travelers, such as by eliminating the need for an additional sign-on.

Amadeus believes integration with HR systems improves profile management and tracking of travelers for security reasons. "You can track travelers without this integration, but the data on personnel supplied by the HR department is much more accurate," said Isaac.