Online Booking: Tools Update Preferences

Sabre's GetThere unit and Galileo International's Highwire recently announced the capability to automatically and regularly update preferred supplier preferences from spreadsheets, as well as from such supplier contract modeling tools as Rosenbluth International's Dacoda.

Announced separately by the two corporate travel booking providers, the new level of integration will benefit companies by reducing the time and labor they need to spend entering preferred supplier data.

"To show preferencing by different airlines, we now have to go and type in the city pairs with the primary, secondary and tertiary carriers," said Valerie Dickson, assistant vice president of global travel with GetThere client Credit Suisse First Boston in New York. Noting that such large companies as CSFB can have hundreds of entries, she said, "It is a daunting task, so I am definitely looking forward to using the new enhancement."

The new features are part of a handful of enhancements managed self-booking vendors will market in the coming months, particularly since the airline-owned Orbitz booking site has set its sights on the corporate marketplace (BTN, June 3). With Orbitz potentially leveraging the pricing clout of its owners and charter members, providers of managed self-booking products more than ever will need to differentiate by emphasizing the deeply managed travel aspects of their systems.

No doubt the most important of these key features—as long as corporate air pricing remains a complex mess of multi-level discounting even down to the city—is that the booking tool incorporates preferred supplier parameters and can enforce policy compliance.

Responses about these related requirements dominated a recent informal poll of 42 travel managers. Well above meetings management, profile management and even data ownership, buyers said the most important self-booking functionalities relate to compliance, including pre-trip approval, reason codes for exception reporting, configurable policy components, variable low-fare windows and/or vendor program management.

"This is extremely important because as we drive toward maximizing expense reductions, it will be more important that these tools can accomplish on the front end what travel counselors used to," said Doug DeBaltzo of Dayton, Ohio-based NCR, referring to the practice of urging travelers toward preferred vendors.

Many travel managers said the self-booking tools do an even better job than agents of corralling market share.

"Compliance is much better with the tool," said Nan Vanee, Stamford, Conn.-based Xerox associate commodity team manager. "There are business rules built into our booking tool and menus come up that say, 'You're out of policy.' "

In addition to automating preferred vendor data entry for companies that maintain as many as 2,000 entries in a spreadsheet, GetThere also mentioned Rosenbluth's Dacoda and American Express' DealPower—which is due to launch today—as contract modeling tools with which it has tested the integration. Parsippany, N.J.-based Highwire's announcement related only to integration with Dacoda, which is sold by Eclipse Advisors, a Rosenbluth subsidiary.

Other modeling tools from such vendors as Travel Analytics and WorldTravel BTI also can link with GetThere.

"The third party has to do a little programming so they can map their recommendations into a format we can use, but it was not a big challenge," said Jay Gabany, director of travel operations at GetThere.

"It's absolutely the right direction to go in," said Solon, Ohio-based Travel Analytics' CEO Scott Gillespie. "Self-booking tools offer excellent control at the point of sale. We're confident we can supply GetThere customers the prioritized and preferenced file inputs that reflect their contract requirements. I haven't had any substantive discussions with vendors of other tools."

Regarding costs to clients, Gabany said the manual process or the import of a spreadsheet come at no cost. As for the technology integration, Gabany said, "We had to do development work for the two agencies we're working with, so there were some fees. But they're incredibly modest and the return on that investment is a fortune."

Gabany would not reveal how many clients now are using the integration, saying it is too new. "Probably 90 percent of our corporate customers use the market-based preference feature of the system, and probably 25 percent are enforcing selection of those vendors."

GetThere's market-based preferencing uses color coding and different font sizes to highlight vendors with which clients have global, regional, national, hub, city pair or airport pair deals. It allows for the designation of primary carrier, secondary carrier and so on, as well as letting buyers completely block non-preffereds. But Gabany warned against that last option, which only "a couple" of clients have used. "It might be appropriate to let them be out of policy sometimes," he said. "The way to do travel policy is not to hide options, because then they may not be able to use your tool, hurting adoption. We'll catch them before they make a purchase and force them to explain it, then report on that."

DeBaltzo agreed there are pitfalls.

"We have a system where we download a spreadsheet into the tool and it will list only preferred properties on the first screen," said NCR's DeBaltzo, whose company uses Waltham, Mass.-based E-Travel's corporate booking product. "The traveler can click on a tab for more vendors, which goes to our chain agreements. Otherwise, they would have to call agents. Regarding the impact on adoption, it is a double-edge sword. Limiting the content can be viewed as a product liability, so it's our job to educate the traveler that the tool is designed that way." Gabany said GetThere's customers consistently improve on their ability to shift market share when they use such features. "Agencies have never been good policemen," he said. "Compliance online is always higher than offline."