<B> Thomson Mandates Tech</B>
<I>Moving From Phones to Worldspan System</I>
By Cheryl Rosen
<i>Indianapolis</i> - Thomson Consumer Electronics this week will put some teeth where its mouth is as it begins the first major rollout of Worldspan's Trip Manager, and becomes the first buyer to mandate that arrangements for travel from one corporate site to another only can be made electronically.
When the system is fully deployed, travel arrangements for employees will no longer be accepted by the agency over the telephone.
"We're really looking to reduce overhead on routine trips to cities where we have locations," said worldwide travel manager Cindy Heston. "Within 60 days after the rollout, if you are going to El Paso, you are going to use the system, or else send an e-mail or a fax. We're not going to waste our consultants' time with telephone calls for the booking of simple trips."
To help facilitate Thomson's move toward travel technology, its agency, St. Louis-based mega Maritz Travel, last week inked a distribution deal with Worldspan to help sell Trip Manager to its corporate client base.
For Thomson, the choice of the World-span system comes almost three years after Heston first began looking into travel booking systems, begun when Sabre first announced it would be developing a system at the 1995 NBTA conference. Intrigued, Heston approached Worldspan and signed on for Travel Shopper, an e-mail based, off-the-shelf system developed by the CRS in the '80s. A year later, Worldspan "started seriously looking at building a product and putting programmers to work on it," Heston said. By November 1995, thanks to an incentive program that rewarded users with free hotel room nights and other prizes, Heston had moved 105 travel arrangers--and 10-15 percent of Thomson's domestic travel--off the phones and onto e-mail.
"I wanted to test the waters and see if we would even be interested in automated booking," Heston said. And, added domestic corporate travel manager Debby Shircliff, the early start helped identify travelers and travel arrangers interested in and accustomed to technology, who now will serve as the first testers of Trip Manager.
The success of the early system convinced not only the travel department, but senior management as well. "Once it was in place and the commission cuts continued to come, the executive committee, which is made up of the heads of all the departments, said okay, this is good. Now let's improve on it," Heston said.
Thomson looked at a number of systems but "kept coming back to Worldspan" because of its experience with Travel Shopper and its good relationship with World-span, Maritz, and a primary airline partner who is a Worldspan owner, she said.
In internal beta testing at Thomson since September, Trip Manager this week will be rolled out to about 300 travelers and travel arrangers in the United States and Mexico. By Feb. 15, Heston expects to have all staff at Indianapolis headquarters on the system, and to bring in travel arrangers from other sites for training. The bilingual Shircliff, meanwhile, this week is holding "train the trainer" sessions in Mexico.
Thomson again plans an incentive program to encourage change in travelers' behavior. Heston will ask her airline partners for free tickets to offer as raffle prizes for online bookers in return for linking the Thomson booking site to the airline Web site. With the raffle as a carrot and the mandate as a stick, she expects to move 30-35 percent of Thomson's $40 million domestic air volume onto Trip Manager.
When Worldspan adds international capabilities to the system, Thomson world headquarters in Paris will consider it. "We anticipate that when Worldspan gets the capability, trips like Indianapolis to Paris will be on there as well," said Heston.
For now, the system will handle only air bookings and Thomson's two preferred car vendors. When Worldspan develops a link to Maritz' hotel database, hotel bookings will go electronic as well.
For Maritz, meanwhile, the decision to sign on as a distributor for Trip Manager was an easy one, given that the relationship is not exclusive, said corporate vice president of information technology Richard Spradling: "We've been looking for best-of-breed solutions and we believe this is one. It's a full-functioning product and frankly, the fact that it's being implemented by Worldspan is a plus."
While Worldspan is not Maritz's primary CRS, it is the system of choice for 25-30 percent of Maritz's corporate customers, Spradling said. "We haven't seen one booking system that's right for every customer, based on their CRS of choice, ease of use, Internet versus client-server technology--all those issues that go into making a selection. Our strategy is to help clients implement the system that makes the most sense for them." Maritz is involved in pilots of "five booking products with eight different customers," as well as evaluations of 12 T&E systems, he said.
As for the relationship with Worldspan, Spradling said, "Right now we have a letter of intent to provide this product to our clients. We'll do some level of integration, though since it's Web-based, there is not a lot of software involved. We will help integrate the system with the travel management process, training travelers, integrating direct booked reservations, conforming to corporate policy and fulfilling reservations that are not e-tickets."
With negotiations for Thomson's first-ever fee-based contract with Maritz still underway, neither side could yet comment on the direct savings of automated versus telephone reservations. But Heston said she is asking for a grid of eight prices, based on whether the reservation calls for printed or electronic tickets, and if it is booked through Trip Manager, e-mail, fax or phone.
Spradling estimated that after the initial start-up costs for integration and training, corporations will see an overall savings from online systems if they can move 20 percent of bookings online. While mandates surely help, "I'd say that clients that widely implement systems can expect 15-20 percent utilization by the end of '98 even if they don't mandate usage, based upon the empirical evidence we have so far."
At Lockheed Martin's Idaho Technologies Co., another Trip Manager test site, travelers are split about 50-50 between loving the system and resenting it, said travel department supervisor Dick Schuman. Offered since November to about 35 "heavy travelers," the system has brought "no real surprises--people who love computers and being in control of their destinies love it, while others who have always had secretaries taking care of their travel want to continue that," he said.
Invited by Morris Travel and Worldspan to give the system a spin, Schuman at this point plans neither to mandate its use nor to move the burden of booking to travel arrangers. "We have an in-house travel department, and we felt that if we were going to have the secretaries do all the work, that was just pushing our work off on them. What we wanted was to have the travelers do the work themselves," he said.
But he did expect to meet with his agency at some point to redefine the fee schedule for automated versus telephone bookings. "Once we decide to open this up company-wide we'll look at renegotiating our contract with Morris," he said. "On a large company level, a system like this can save an awful lot of time. For a company like ours, with 1,000 trips a month, it can really reduce your costs."
Meanwhile, Worldspan director of travel agency and corporate marketing Helen Porter said a new version of Trip Manager, with improved negotiated rate and international capabilities, will debut by April. The system, which two other corporations also are testing, lists for $50 per user plus a $5,000 set-up fee and a $2,500 training fee. After the one-time costs, there is a $6 per- year fee per user.
"Our hope is that pricing per user, rather than per PNR, serves to not disincentivize travelers from using the system as much as possible," Porter said.