<B>WTP To Fulfill Corps.</B>
<I>Sprint, BTS Set To Debut Online Booking Fulfillment Service</I>
By Megan Hjermstad
WorldTravel Partners this week will announce that it has been working in conjunction with TRX Technology Services to begin providing low-cost central fulfillment of reservations made through corporate online booking tools for its first customers, Sprint and Sabre's internal travel manager.
The service, Corporate Fulfillment Services, will be the business counterpart to the Online Fulfillment Services that TRX provides on the consumer side for Expedia, Continental Airlines, US Airways and Orbitz.
"We've been able to build scale and low-cost fulfillment in the business to consumer side, but no one has built this scale for central fulfillment and low-cost fulfillment in the business to business side," said Danny Hood, president WorldTravel Partners-BTI Americas. "That has not really existed for the large corporate market."
The automated fulfillment center will offer quality control, low-cost ticket distribution, a traveler help desk and navigation support on a 24-hour basis. WorldTravel Partners will extend CFS to its own corporate clients, clients of other agencies, other travel management companies and online booking system vendors. WorldTravel Partners has identified 38 companies that have significant adoption rates of self-service reservations and are looking for low-cost fulfillment options.
Neither Sprint nor Sabre were ready to discuss their plans to use the new service starting in October.
"I think the concept of online fulfillment really is the travel agency of the future," said Norm Rose, consultant for TravelTechnology.com. "As self-booking becomes the dominant way, online fulfillment is what the agency will be doing. It has a great deal of importance for the industry."
Rose said it makes sense for the agency to handle fulfillment of online bookings because while technology companies are doing fulfillment, it is not a core competency. "In a way, you see a convergence happening in the marketplace. Some tech companies are becoming agencies, but it depends upon how much they want to build a support structure," said Rose. "Most technology firms, if they are in software business, want to be improving software not operating a service center."
Patrick O'Halleran, manager of travel reporting and communication at Honeywell, said that most corporations when they are considering an agency are thinking about fulfillment if they are looking to promote online booking. "E-fulfillment is a really big deal in travel agency models," said O'Halleran. "I would say it is critical. It is a new thing, so it will be interesting to see how it all plays out."
WorldTravel Partners is not the only travel management company lining up to provide 24-hour support and low-cost fulfillment options for online vendors. Sato Travel earlier this year began providing low-cost online fulfillment for E-Travel Inc. (BTN, April 3).
"Pretty much all of the big agencies are going to be doing it," said Steve Reynolds, general manager for TRX Technology Services--the former Travel Technologies Group. "Our advantage is we have a whole lot of software, a lot of scale and we're ahead of the game."
TRX Online Fulfillment Services, which got its start issuing 50 tickets for Expedia in October of 1996, last year issued 2.5 million tickets or one out of every five tickets issued on the Web. OFS has grown at 23 percent on a quarter- over-quarter basis since its inception, and Hood expects the same exponential growth on the corporate side. Hood projected that Corporate Fulfillment Services will fulfill around 1 million transactions over the next 12 months and have the ability to scale up as online bookings increase.
WorldTravel Partners will have a different staff on the business to business side than the business to consumer side, with separate agents who understand more complicated ticketing. The Corporate Fulfillment Services operation will share WorldTravel Partners' existing 24-hour facility in Kansas City and benefit from incremental costing.
Hood said that a company is not getting the first economy in a fee-based environment until they get up to 2,600 bookings online, and can cut the first agent from their costs. Hood said that CFS will cut the transaction fees by up to 30 to 50 percent, beginning with the first transaction, as long as travelers accept a reasonable phone call ratio, and don't require multiple e-mail responses, or excessive online chat time with an agent.
The amount of handholding required by the traveler needs to go down in order for corporations to see significant savings. "The idea in a consumer sense of the abandoned shopping cart is also applicable to the corporate side of the business. Basically the traveler gets stuck, calls up the agency and it is like starting all over again," said Rose. "That's what needs to be fixed."
WorldTravel Partners will be providing a round-the-clock, first-level help desk to coach a user through the electronic booking process. If travelers are online and get stuck with a screen and need navigation help, they can send an e-mail and will get an immediate response. If travelers need further help, they can communicate with an agent via an Internet chat service.
Rose said it is absolutely critical that the call center agent be able to pull up the same screen and access the information already input by the traveler. "The information available on the desktop is a key element of any type of assisted e-commerce," said Rose. "The call center agent needs to be looking at the same thing the customer is looking at."
Dorian Stonie, Internet travel technology manager for Hewlett-Packard, has found the coordination between online booking systems and agencies to be very good. "For Web-based bookings, the agents have access to complete reservation for any changes, modifications and cancellations," said Stonie.
On the software side, WTP has adapted all of its knowledge-based and e-mail management software for corporate travel reservations.
"We had to build a little bit different software, like the auto ticketing module that we built in CoRRe that is used in TRX fulfillment," said Hood. "The automation has been configured differently so that you're able to do auto ticketing and auto split ticketing for the managed travel business to business transactions."
The CoRRe mid-office quality control product is essential on the corporate side because documentation is the key issue for corporate reporting. "The big difference is in the PNR," said Rose, "because there are more codes in there for management reporting to corporations, and more need for file finishing and quality control processes.