TQ3 Enhances European Options
Mechelen, Belgium - TQ3 Travel Solutions has been broadening its service options in Europe at both the multinational and small-client extremes of the market. For the largest companies with consolidated cross-border travel management, it is operating a multilingual center here, just north of Brussels. The European Service Center handles the travel needs of ExxonMobil, TQ3's largest client worldwide, in eight countries, with a ninth coming on-stream this month. TQ3 said it has added five more multinational clients at Mechelen, which handles calls in English, French, Dutch and German, although ExxonMobil accounts for 65 percent of transactions handled by the center.
At the other end of the scale, TQ3 has launched a public booking Web site aimed at self-employed business travelers and small companies. Called TQ3 Direct, it initially is available in the Belgian market and also is based at Mechelen. The company claimed two chief selling points for TQ3 Direct: The Web site includes bulk purchase fares that TQ3 has bought from several airlines and can sell low-cost carriers and traditional airlines side by side. Booking a seat on a mainstream airline is free, but there is a charge for making a reservation on one of the budget carriers.
The Mechelen center, which opened in January, now handles the great majority of ExxonMobil's travel bookings in Europe. Travelers call a local toll-free number, are given a choice of languages, followed by a choice between making a short-haul or long-haul booking or dealing with a customer care consultant. Half the tickets issued by Mechelen are e-tickets and 90 percent of invoices are issued automatically. Consultants work to a service level agreement, which includes answering calls within 20 seconds and replying to faxes and e-mails within 30 minutes.
TQ3 COO Toby Joseph expects to attract more clients to Mechelen. He believes there are 100 to 200 companies within Europe with the potential to operate a consolidated multinational program of this kind. "Every multinational tender we are receiving at the moment is asking us how we would serve them on a centralized basis," he said.
Joseph claimed the transaction fee charged by TQ3 for using the European Service Center is "competitive," but this is not the reason why it delivers cost savings. "The objective is not to get the lowest transaction rate, otherwise we would have taken this operation to India," he said. "The transaction fee is the lowest element of a company's total travel and entertainment cost. The major savings come from suppliers seeing that our customers are not only willing but able to implement policy on a centralized basis for numerous countries. We can change a city pair from United Airlines to American Airlines instantly for a client. That would take much longer if handling the client in several different countries, all with different service configurations."
As an example of how Mechelen has changed client perception, Joseph said airline alliance sales teams now are sending a single representative to visit ExxonMobil, whereas before each member airline would come to negotiate individually.
Operating a cross-border booking and ticketing operation presents several difficulties, especially one that covers several currencies. TQ3 is getting around most of the problems by switching into a national office reservation system identification appropriate to where the travel request originates. For instance, half of Exxon's reservations are made by travelers based in the United Kingdom. Their trips are booked, ticketed and invoiced in pounds sterling instead of euros, which avoids exchange rate exposure and commission on currency conversion. Tickets that still have to be issued on paper either are sent to a satellite ticket printer in a client office or to a printer in the nearest TQ3 location in the country.
Meanwhile, the new TQ3 Direct, while aimed squarely at the unmanaged business travel market, has points of interest for the corporate buyer. According to Luc Wellens, managing director of TQ3 Belgium, the Web site is intended to grab a share of the 20 percent of air bookings that were not handled by traditional travel agents in Belgium in 2002. Perhaps the most unusual feature is that it represents one of the first attempts at bulk-buying of airline seats in Europe.
"At the moment, there is no actual purchase," Wellens said. "Participating airlines make seats available to us, and we set our own fares with a pricing module that adapts our selling price to daily competitor trends. We can release unsold seats back to the airline companies three days before departure. Any seats that are not released three days before departure and that remain unsold are indeed our financial responsibility. A probable development in January 2004 will be our buying the seats in advance in bulk and thus becoming totally responsible for all profit and loss coming from them."