Travel Buyer Requests No Proposals In Agency Bid

<B> Travel Buyer Requests No Proposals In Agency Bid</B>

By Sarah Welt

<I>Philadelphia</I> - Taking a simplified approach to the travel agency bid process, Rohm and Haas has selected a single domestic agency--down from using more than a dozen--by doing away with the traditional request for proposals and instead using a simple list of seven questions composed by its internal travel council.

The specialty chemical company this year also implemented point-of-sale technology at its new onsite office to improve agent productivity, and mandated the use of the American Express corporate card for the first time.

Henry Good, Rohm and Haas' director of insurance and travel, is the moving force behind these travel management initiatives. Good formed a travel council of employees who were "griping about travel like I was," including frequent travelers, travel arrangers, salespeople, research scientists and internal auditors.

Rohm and Haas' travel initiatives began last year when "we did some benchmarking and found out we did not compare very favorably to companies that did a good job managing their travel," Good said. "We did not mandate a single credit card, like the good companies did. And we did not have a single travel agency to consolidate programs, like the good companies did."

For the company's agency bid, he charged the travel council with a mission to come up with questions for the travel agencies to answer. Having been through bidding processes before, Good said he felt that "RFPs are an absolute waste of time. You get back 50 pages of responses to questions that are all the same."

The council's seven-question list included: What are the three most important things our travelers need to know about your handling of our business travel functions? How do you go about getting the best domestic and international fares? What will you do/what won't you do? And, What other global customer arrangements do you have? Please describe how they work.

Rohm and Haas met with eight agencies in the preliminary stages and narrowed the list of finalists to four, who were invited to give presentations to the council. In May, the company turned over its $40 million U.S.-based travel program to Maritz Travel Co. of St. Louis, under a management fee-based contract.

Previously, Rosenbluth International managed 50 percent of Rohm and Haas' travel, while the rest of the account was split among more than ten agencies.

The RFP bypass tack is not entirely new, and Carol Salcito, president of Management Alternatives in Stamford, Conn., said that "a number of companies will in fact take this approach" this year. She called the use of a simple list of questions "a creative, proactive way of doing it. Why go through all the steps if seven questions will suffice?"

But travel management consultant Tom Wilkinson of Alexandria, Va., was less sure. Travel buyers with strong travel backgrounds might be able to circumvent the RFP process, since many RFPs do sound alike in describing their unique benefits, he acknowledged. But in some areas of the selection process--especially the financials--this approach often will not cover enough detail, he maintained.

"I have never seen even the very experienced financial guys come to the agency world and intuitively understand agency financials," Wilkinson said. "It is too easy for agencies to hide things unless you really dig into those."

Wilkinson did, however, applaud the way Good quickly narrowed the number of bidders for his business and then focused on a small number of finalists. Wilkinson suggested that travel managers hold early meetings with agency contenders in a "get to know each other" phase, and then subsequent meetings with a limited number of players to avoid the "traditional dog and pony show."

"By the time we get to that stage we want to assume the agencies we are sitting down with pack the gear to do what the client wants," he said.

Maritz has set up a 21-person onsite office at Rohm and Haas' Philadelphia headquarters, where agents are equipped with Maritz's point-of-sale tool, Proview.

Said Good, "Proview is exactly what we wanted. It was implemented when we started and was up in three weeks. My understanding is that the agents love it."

In addition to consolidating, Rohm and Haas has instituted another best practice this year: On Feb. 1 it mandated the use of the American Express corporate card for the first time. Previously, travelers had Amex cards, but their use was not required.

Moving to a single agency and a single card was vital in gathering data for future bids on air, car rental and hotels, Good noted. While the company has some discount agreements in place, "we recognize that with no single source of data, our contracts are not very good." Now he hopes that when the current contracts expire towards the end of the year, he can do substantially better.

Good, who reports to the company's treasurer, has found senior management support essential in getting his initiatives off the ground. "I've got absolute total management support, no questions asked," he said. This is important because while he has been at Rohm and Haas for 28 years, he is new to travel.

"I've been in travel now all of four months," he said. "They asked me to take this on as travel director to see what we could do with it."

While he began with a focus on the domestic scene, Good has not entirely overlooked the bigger picture. For now, he acknowledged, "each individual country does its own thing. At this point we are just starting to collect some data."

But he also noted that Maritz's global alliance with Internet Inc. played a role in the agency's selection. "We intend to have a global program and take the corporate card and single travel agency worldwide in 1999," Good said. "So the fact that they had a single network out there, a network that seemed to be adaptable to what we think we are going to want to do, was important.