BTN Names Computer Associates' Hanzl Travel Manager Of The Year

For being the first large-company travel buyer to bypass the travel agency in favor of contracting with an online booking technology vendor, Ellen Hanzl, Computer Associates divisional assistant vice president of corporate travel, this month received Business Travel News' 2003 Travel Manager of the Year award.

Similar to other buyers who have pushed beyond high front-end adoption by using travel management company e-fulfillment centers, Hanzl took advantage of economies of scale to lower transaction costs. Yet, while some corporations also have relationships with both the agency and its fulfillment center, Hanzl in January 2002 handed over her company's agency fulfillment relationship to Sabre's GetThere, which outsources the functions to TQ3 Travel Solutions. This leap of faith, by one tech firm with another, signifies the commoditization of fulfillment and the compression of services from multiple vendors into one.

Months later, other big industry tech providers—starting with Expedia and Orbitz and followed this month by Galileo International—began marketing themselves as all-in-one corporate agencies. Sabre, meanwhile, sees GetThere's Fulfillment Service Option as an important revenue source going forward (BTN, Aug. 11).

For Computer Associates, it was a natural that as the online system severs connections between travelers and agents—65 percent to 70 percent of CA's bookings now are handled by travelers with the tool—the system's owner becomes the primary provider of travel management. Hanzl argues that she did not give up as much influence over the fulfillment agents as some would think. Indeed, Islandia, N.Y.-based CA reached out to its dedicated TQ3 agents in St. Louis. "We wanted them to feel they're part of CA and like they're part of something," said Hanzl, who joined CA in 1995 after serving the firm as an onsite corporate agent for five years. "We fly them in to Long Island once a year so they can meet our people. After all, these are the people who are on the phone with our employees."

Former managed travel consultant and GetThere senior director of fulfillment services Tom Wilkinson developed GetThere's FSO, partly because GetThere did not think the travel management companies with which it partnered to serve clients were forcing down costs and their fees quickly enough (BTN, March 12, 2001).

After launching FSO early last year, CA now books a few thousand of the roughly 10,000 monthly passenger name records handled by TQ3 in St. Louis as a subcontractor to GetThere. On the CA account, which is worth nearly $40 million in U.S. booked air travel, there are 11 dedicated agents supporting low touch and full service reservations.

"Ellen risked her career to be the first and biggest on this kind of program," Wilkinson said. "It showed a lot of confidence in what is the first purely online-centric model that treats offline as the exception."

Hanzl said it was her company's travelers who led it to FSO. "At first, the reason we even had the tool was because we couldn't hire enough people to handle the phones," she said, referring to a beta test of Sabre's Business Travel Solutions launched in 1999. "So it was just alleviating the volume on the agents, but then its usage kept on creeping up. In 2001, we were not saving as much as we could on self-booking because we were paying a fee to Sabre and we were also paying a management fee to Amex. It was the usual arrangement for a large onsite, so we were paying booking fees and also paying to maintain a full service agency. With fewer tickets being handled by the agents, we had fabulous customer service, but it was expensive to maintain an in-plant, three branches, management and 45 agents. We paid the overhead, and it really became costly when commissions trickled down. The volume was no longer there because of the shift to self-bookings."

Hanzl could not reveal details on transaction fees other than to say Computer Associates enjoyed a 50 percent drop after moving to FSO.

In closing CA's onsite, Wilkinson said, Hanzl went through "lots of personal stress and tearful days."

Like many corporations, CA faced the emotions that come with replacing jobs with automation. "No one realized how huge a job it was to go to a fulfillment center and move away from having an agency onsite," Hanzl said. "On a more personal note, people felt pretty bad about these people leaving us. We had a very good experience with Amex as our onsite agency, and we didn't change because of customer service."

Computer Associates and GetThere built business rules into the EnCoRRe midoffice quality control tool—provided to TQ3 by TRX Inc.—that take into account corporate travel policy in examining online bookings and kicking out exceptions for a human check. Addressing such technical requirements clearly demonstrated to Hanzl the value of contracting directly with the technology supplier.

"We were pleasantly surprised, because they had the knowledge and abilities on their product," Hanzl said. "It was tough before we went live. We had a conference call every day. It took every minute of every day, but they went in and reprogrammed for us. If we were working with Amex, it would have had to go to Sabre. Then you're talking to a middle person."

Writing the business rules to handle exceptions to policy was one of the most time-consuming challenges, partly because CA takes a strict approach to such policy tools as enforcing per diem levels. As such, the company's touchless rate—it pays three tiers of fees: no touch, low touch and full service—is not as high as many other users of electronic fulfillment centers.

CA employs a price control desk where most reservations are reviewed "to make sure our contracts are being met or to compare nonrefundable versus refundable fares. We may call the traveler to talk about why the hotel is over the per diem, and then we may call the hotel for a rate. It sounds labor intensive, but it isn't because you know when you pull that queue that the PNR needs servicing. Still, it's ideal if EnCoRRe finds no exception."

Hanzl said a 17-person department at Computer Associates handles "anything the TQ3 agents don't do," such as addressing out-of-policy situations, arranging waivers and favors, managing billing, the travel Web site, policy updates, group travel and reporting. In essentially auditing the travel program, she said, the department also collaborates with expense management personnel to better explain spending or policy exceptions.