"In my culture and experience here at Snapchat, [what's] more important is to make sure the traveler is having a good [user] experience versus, you know, 'Oh we're saving a ton of money,'" said global travel manager Sean Parham. Compliance and savings will follow if travelers are given a positive experience, he thinks.
As a travel manager, Parham considers the company's primary online booking tool, Concur, pretty robust, but his Millennial, tech-savvy travelers, especially the engineers, consider the tool "a dinosaur," "something from another era," "clunky" and "slow moving." He had attributed the experience not to the tool but to the encumbrances of corporate travel policy, which don't exist for leisure travel. But that doesn't matter to the social media company's travelers. "We're dealing with people who are coming from Google or Amazon," he said. "They look at Concur as really a blocker for them to get their job done because they have to spend so much time with it."
While Snapchat still uses Concur, a trial run of emerging online booking tool WhereTo this year delivered the user experience Parham had considered unattainable, and it cut booking fees, encouraged lower-fare bookings and drove adoption of the booking tool to 95 percent. Reporting and admin proved difficult, but the test has earned the OBT a potential spot on Snapchat's list of candidates for RFP, which Parham said will begin this summer. Here's how things played out.
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Considering a New Tool
Parham had come across WhereTo at a June 2017 Global Business Travel Association event in Los Angeles, where he was playing judge for a session in which startups presented their technologies to travel buyers. Parham was openly critical: "This isn't a corporate tool. This isn't going to work in a corporate environment. This is for mom and dad to take the kids to the beach."
In September 2018, the tool crossed his path again, when a longtime industry friend who had gone to work for WhereTo in sales told him the tool had undergone a lot of changes and served both travelers and travel managers well. Indeed, Parham was impressed by the demo: "It was a much more streamlined tool. Not a lot of clicks to get to the end like Concur. It was very simple, very clean."
In January of this year, he decided to pilot WhereTo for flight bookings for Snapchat's annual sales conference, held in April in Orlando. He wanted to streamline the event's booking experience, which normally calls for travelers to reach out to Snapchat's travel management company. "[Our travelers] don't want to talk to anybody on the phone. They don't even want to email anybody," he said. "They just want to get it done. They want to work with the least amount of human activity or interaction they can get." Parham also didn't like his TMC's proposed solution, as it was "very costly and it involved bringing in Cvent and then integrating with Concur." He wondered, "Can WhereTo scale to meet the needs of this group of 700 people?"
Parham convinced the CFO to try the tool based on a projected 60 percent decrease in transaction costs from eliminating TMC booking fees. The events team, though, worried that the new tool would crash in the middle of the bookings. Several demos and conversations over six weeks got them on board. There was a big benefit for Parham, as well. He could see, in one place, whether travelers had viewed the event invitation, whether they had registered for the event, whether they had filled in their profiles and whether they had booked their flights.
Working with WhereTo
Parham uploaded a CSV file—employee names, employee IDs, accounting details, contact information and who's allowed to fly in what class—into the tool. For domestic passengers, he set up policy in the tool to allow just flights flying to Orlando, the cabin class to economy, and dates to align with the conference. For those arriving from abroad, he allowed premium economy and more time for travel. Artificial intelligence determined the lowest logical fare based on that policy, negotiated airline agreements and the event's dates and displayed those at the top.
If a traveler saw and tried to book other flights, a pop-up message would instruct him or her what was allowed for this trip. From there, the traveler could choose a different flight or follow instructions to contact Parham's team for approval to continue with the existing booking. "It was very unique in that we could literally pull people out and say this person could get this kind of parameter around their travel versus this person or whole groups," said Parham. He said Concur can do the same thing for class of service, but it's a bit more complicated. The restrictive features, combined with the tool's "slick and clean" user interface, drove in-channel bookings, he said. Around 95 percent of the roughly 700 air bookings went through the tool.
Additionally, when a traveler selected a fare that was higher than the lowest logical, the tool would message the traveler that he or she had not selected the most affordable fare and would present a lower fare option within the same fare class, as well as the opportunity to book it. This "visual guilt" motivated a lot of travelers to book lower fares, saving Snapchat $100,000, said Parham.
Travelers were much happier about their booking experience than in previous years, according to Parham, and the VP of events was pleased both with the positive booking experience and with the savings realized from lowers.
The Big Downsides
WhereTo's reporting and administrative functionality, however, were limited. "My team really struggled with being able to support the group through the tool because of the limited functionality," Parham said. When the team approved a booking that broke with the travel policy restrictions Parham had set up, his team couldn't change the policy for that traveler's profile, as they could in other booking tools. Instead, they had to delete the profile and then manually re-create it, even for minor issues like name misspellings. The travel team deleted and re-created a painstaking 280 profiles.
Parham also couldn't see statuses for passenger name records: whether they'd been ticketed or canceled. At times, travelers were shown as not ticketed on the agency reports but confirmed as ticketed in the booking tool, or vice versa. Apparently, the PNRs for bookings completed offline weren't syncing with the tool. For example, if a traveler started in the booking tool, ran into a problem and finished the booking with an agent, it wasn't flowing back in, Parham recalled. "There was a little bit of back-and-forth with myself, my team and the WhereTo team as to whether this PNR was ticketed or not."
There were also glitches with the content coming into the tool. Entire flights by Qantas and JetBlue were not showing up or certain cabin classes by those carriers were not appearing, but the WhereTo team quickly rectified these issues when Parham raised them.
As Parham conducts an RFP for Snapchat's primary booking tool this summer, he'll consider WhereTo if it deals with these shortcomings. He expects WhereTo will get past them, though not quite in time but rather by the end of the year. "They've come so far so quickly that I think in another year, they could definitely give Concur significant competition," Parham said.
What Parham Wants in His Booking Tool
His ideal booking tool would incorporate artificial intelligence sophisticated enough to cull traveler emails and calendar invites for upcoming meetings, then combine that information with the traveler's preferences and the company's preferred air and hotel suppliers to build a trip. The traveler would receive a message about his or her upcoming meeting with the trip attached, along with nearby restaurants noted and car services arranged if needed. Travelers could easily accept, modify or ignore the itinerary. He noted, "This would solve three big issues that most travel programs face: advance purchase, improved use of preferred suppliers and booking adoption/program compliance."
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