The End To End Is Not The End

<B>The End To End Is Not The End</B>

It's time we put to rest the myth of the "end-to-end" travel management system.

For several years, the holy grail of travel technology has been the ability to string together online booking, expense reporting and reimbursement and decision support.

As the travel industry and its technology continues to evolve at its current rapid pace, new developments and capabilities must be considered in terms of their impact on the travel management program, and how they play a role as part of a company's larger technology strategy. Given the constantly changing landscape, we must challenge past assumptions.

One key new capability for this industry is comprehensive online meeting management. In the traditional end-to-end system, meeting and event management is completely ignored. For many corporations, meeting spend comprises 40 percent of the overall travel budget. For the most part, not only are these costs not captured and managed, but today the meetings process is mostly manual. Providers of online meeting management solutions have made significant progress in the past year. These solutions effectively select meeting destinations, source meeting suppliers (including the RFP and negotiation process), track meeting budgets, capture meeting costs and manage the meeting registration process. Providers of travel purchasing tools have many potential integration points with online meeting management systems.

One key integration point is the ability to provide a seamless meeting registration process that includes the booking of air, hotel and, if necessary, car rental. An integrated registration process ensures that once employees register for corporate meetings, they can book travel plans as part of a seamless user experience where company-specific travel policy is communicated, monitored and enforced. That experience also includes the best rates, whether specific to a meeting or for individual travel. The most important integration point between travel purchasing and meeting management tools is business intelligence. The goal is to consolidate meetings spend with transient spend to have a more complete view of how travel funds are spent.

Certainly, there are more functional gaps in the traditional end-to-end travel management system. These include integration with corporate HR systems. The issue of profile synchronization is widely misunderstood. Our perspective is that corporations should "own" profiles--not travel agencies, and not GDSs. For corporations to "own" profiles, a self-service system should exist that allows travel managers, travelers and travel arrangers to update travel profiles in real time over the Internet.

Guess what? This system exists--it's the online booking tool. A problem with this scenario is that until online usage rates ramp up, we still need to ensure that an updated copy of the profile exists for the agency to access when travelers call to make a reservation. HR integration plays a role in this scenario by feeding updated employee information from the corporate system directly to the travel profile.

HR integration is merely one example of how travel management technology must leverage and integrate with a company's existing information technology infrastructure. Nearly all corporations have invested hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions, of dollars in an enterprise IT infrastructure, including enterprise resource planning. These systems cover a wide range of operations, including accounting and finance, manufacturing and supply chain planning, procurement, project management, human resources and customer relationship management. With all of the potential integration points to the enterprise, it's no surprise that such companies as Oracle and SAP are interested in travel management. Savvy travel managers try to understand how they can fit into and leverage these systems so they can improve the effectiveness of the travel management program and the efficiency of the enterprise overall.

In this world of "clicks and bricks," we must learn how to integrate the online world with the offline world. For the corporate travel industry, this means integrating multiple channels of interaction, including Web, wireless Web, phone and e-mail to provide travelers with the same high level of service regardless of what channel is used. A great enabler for this type of service is customer relationship management technology. With CRM, technology providers can integrate online and offline records and more comprehensively track and understand the behavior and preferences of individual travelers. Using this information, technology providers and their service partners can offer personalized service and can more effectively respond to traveler issues. Leveraging CRM technology, we can not only integrate the back office (for ticketing), but the front office as well.

These are all exciting developments. Even compared with a year ago, there is much more available. Over the next year, we are expecting even more. We must continue to expand our own vision about how technology can impact the corporate travel department. To provide a platform that integrates existing capabilities and easily can incorporate new capabilities as they become available, the industry must embrace what is called enterprise travel management. ETM provides corporations with a solution with which they can start implementing comprehensive Internet-based travel management. Now, more than ever, we're finally beginning to realize a comprehensive vision for "end to end."<I>

Bart Littlefield is vice president of marketing for E-Travel Inc., based in Waltham, Mass.