Ludger Bals
The Transnationalmet with GetThere EMEA head of sales, marketing and distribution channel Ludger Bals, at the Association of Corporate Travel Executives conference here last month, to discuss developments in his territory. An excerpt of the conversation follows.
What's new with corporate online booking in Europe?
Three or four years ago, everyone questioned online. Today, every travel management company has a clear policy and strategy. We are in competition with Europe-based corporate booking products, but we are building strong relationships with TMCs including American Express, Carlson Wagonlit Travel, BCD Travel, Portman and others. FCm bought the German agency DER. Formerly, DER wasn't as interested in GetThere, but now they're coming back to us because their footprint is bigger. As larger organizations consolidate and reduce the number of TMCs they work with, we have an opportunity to grow with this consolidation. More than two dozen GetThere clients are rolled out in at least five European countries, the tool is available in eight languages and adoption among European clients is at 51 percent.
How prevalent are direct relationships as compared with those established through resellers in Europe?
Among our top 20 customers, about 60 percent are direct and 40 percent are via resellers. Most companies don't have one agency all over Europe, so we have been challenged on working with certain TMCs in certain countries. But the complexity with different systems, currencies and languages is our day-to-day work. And we are actively enhancing our agency relationships to enable more knowledgeable sales and support in multiple countries.
One client we recently wrote about, Kodak, uses GetThereas part of a direct contract in the U.S. But for Europe, the company's agency, BCD, recommended Amadeus e-Travel. Some people perceive e-Travel or KDSas having more multinational capabilities or geographic coverage. How do you overcome that?
Every TMC has a project team looking for online technology. In certain situations, there may be a team of three or four people, while there are five or six tools in Europe. You cannot have experts [who know] every tool. So if the client selects TMC A and their expertise is stronger in one country with a certain tool, it's normal that if they have a free choice, they say, "Let's do what we had done last week," because otherwise it's new and complicated. So what we do is try to identify clear opinion leaders in these TMCs and build our relationships.
While there are obviously still content access issues with many suppliers, some in North America have expanded the breadth of their distribution in order to reach the corporate market. In Europe, there are a lot more suppliers that are not in the global distribution systems, but do you think access to corporate customers is becoming a greater priority?
There are prominent speakers in Europe, traveling around giving aggressive, funny speeches. Their former plan was to get all these consumers and say, "Here's my Web site and a low price." They had a radical business model: no GDS. But now, they're seeing a lot of ties on their planes and business travelers are asking for form-of-payment procedures, approval processes, etc. There are a lot of statistics showing that low-cost carriers have more and more business-to-business market share, and some have come back into the GDS.
To what extent is online booking developing in the Middle East and Africa?
There is not a lot of interest in Africa, but we have some contacts. The Middle East is a really good area to be in, and the market is pretty good for online because the complexity is low. There is no rail, and there are a lot of standard, chain hotels. The only problem is that labor costs are so low that the normal return on investment calculation does not really exist. Customers such as Ciscoand General Electricare stepping first into this, and they are not asking us for the ROI--they are looking [to standardize on] the same procedures.