<B>WebCites</B>
By Cheryl Rosen
<B>TIAA/CREF Site To Feature T&E</B>
When John Hintz first began planning his travel department Web site, he polled his travelers about their interest in online booking and expense reporting. To his surprise, the great majority said they liked the service delivered by their corporate agency, Maritz Travel, and did not want to make their own travel reservations on the Internet.
So the Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association College Retirement Equities Fund travel home page will not feature the booking engine Hintz had expected to be his top priority for 2000. Instead, he will focus this year on adding an automated expense reporting system, an option that ranked much higher on his travelers' wish lists--and promised a quicker return on his investment. With $250 billion in investments and real estate holdings, the TIAA/CREF processes $25 million worth of travel and entertainment reimbursements for its 7,500 employees each year.
Like many investment and banking firms in Manhattan, TIAA/CREF is not rushing onto the cutting edge of technology. But that's not to say that it is not carefully exploring the options the Internet offers to improve its service to travelers and its internal processes.
"In a company like this, the point is not to be unique, but to take proven ideas and apply them correctly," Hintz said. "Online booking was going to be our 2000 project, and expense reporting was going to be 2001, but we moved expense reporting up and put reservations on the back burner, because that's what our travelers wanted."
Indeed, even with neither a booking nor an expense reporting system, Hintz's Web site seems to be quite a hit with his internal customers. Last November, its second month in full operation, 1,200 travelers stopped in to check it out.
The site is colorful and easy to navigate, with clear icons that allow travelers to call up their corporate travel policy, preferred hotel directory, maps of company offices, weather information and currency exchange rates. And for Hintz, the job of putting it all online was accomplished with relative ease: The travel site came pre-packaged from his travel agency.
Hintz, who served as the beta test customer for this new Maritz outsourcing service, declined to cite the exact amount he is paying to turn over the site's design and management. But Maritz director of technology marketing Becky March said the standard costs include a one-time installation and set-up fee of between $9,000 and $12,000, and a monthly maintenance fee of $250 to $300. Four customers have signed up for the service and two more sites are under construction.
"Maritz has all the architecture already done, and customizes it for the client. So we have a site that's tailored to our industry and to our company at a fraction of what it would cost us to develop it ourselves," Hintz said. "And like the travel departments at so many companies, we wouldn't have gotten the internal IT resources to do it right."
A former president of the National Business Travel Association, Hintz expects many of his peers to catch on to the concept of outsourced Web site management, whose cost he considers money well spent. For one thing, he expects savings from no longer printing and distributing six issues of the travel department newsletter each year. This month's issue will be the last paper version; from now on, travelers will have to get their news on the site. And adding the automated expense reporting module will bring additional savings in processing costs, as well as free travelers from much of the drudgery of filling out reports by hand.
The TIAA/CREF site pulls traveler profiles and the newsletters off the firm's internal network, so Hintz and his department can load those themselves, without having to access the Maritz host computer. The section hosted by Maritz allows travelers to access a list of preferred suppliers and negotiated discounts on air, train and ground transportation, though only car rentals can be booked online.
Also featured is destination information on every city where the firm has an office, with maps, a five-day weather forecast, travel tips, hotel guides and door-to-door driving directions.
Outsourcing Web site management to Maritz "offers an alternative to corporate travel managers who don't want to be Web masters," March said. "We started doing this on an ad hoc basis, but then we realized all our customers wanted pretty much the same thing. We host the site--it's on our server and links to our content databases, and we can update all our customers' sites at once with a single change on the server.