Visa International is extracting electronically transmitted hotel folio data from about 100 London-area properties and providing it to corporate clients via their corporate payment and expense management providers. The pilot program expands on a domestic Visa USA initiative that began last year in cooperation with Prime Hospitality and JPMorgan Chase.
The European program, which includes a number of Radisson Edwardian sites, brings to 300 the total number of properties providing e-folio data through Visa, officials said.
Meanwhile, MasterCard Corporate Payment Solutions "has advanced plans underway with key member banks to provide business travelers and travel managers with enhanced hotel data reporting for MasterCard commercial payment cardholders," said a spokesperson. "This enhanced folio data would include detailed transaction information, such as room rates, tax, telephone charges and other expenses often included in a similar invoice."
American Express last week did not offer a comment on any similar activity of its own.
Visa is focused in the United States on illustrating to hotel companies the client benefits of more robust purchasing data and a simplified expense reporting process for travelers. In Europe, however, Visa is working with properties on the technicalities of exporting such data from their property management systems, said Tad Fordyce, a vice president in Visa USA's commercial solutions group.
"This is validating our global interoperability," said San Francisco-based Fordyce. "We're in active discussions with a number of chains, which are in various stages of developing the capability; some hotels are more interested than others."
Fordyce said the economic downturn has contributed to the slowing of e-folio evolution, particularly due to cuts in technology investment by customers, hotels and expense management and payment providers.
Finger pointing among all these players on the topic is rampant, partly illustrating how difficult it can be to get several different segments of the business to cooperate.
Fordyce said hotels have been slow to take up the e-folio mantle less because of technical challenges than for reasons related to data privacy and strategy. "Some are wrestling with whether they want to pass the data directly or through the banking network. We say both, but we do think larger customers might want it directly."
At least one hotel company that is set up to provide the data is finding that clients are not ready.
"The challenge is, companies are not prepared to take the data," said Jack McHugh, vice president of sales for Prime Hospitality Corp. in Fairfield, N.J, whose brands include AmeriSuites and Wellesley Inn and Suites. "Technology spending by our customers has decreased dramatically."
Despite the challenges, McHugh said, Prime's interest in e-folio
(BTN, July 31, 2001) had provided it with a competitive advantage in a recent bid. Prime has a new client that McHugh said soon will join IBM in taking expense data electronically.
IBM, a pioneer on the matter both as a customer and an expense management vendor, is pleased with its effort
(BTN, Dec. 4, 2000)."It's above our initial expectations and we're seeing users starting to ask for more of it," said Anthony Angelo, IBM project executive for worldwide employee disbursements. "Employees who have it love it because they don't have to add all that data to expense reports by hand."
He said prepopulating an expense report does require the employee to wait for data to be processed, whereas traditional manual entry can happen right away. Nevertheless, he said, 10,000 expense reports were prepopulated with e-folio data in July—about two-thirds of those eligible for it. "That's pretty darn good," Angelo said.
According to Visa officials, the leverage with hotels that buyers now have is helping to spur additional interest. "Hopefully, we'll soon have an announcement of a major chain participating," said Janet Zablock, Visa USA vice president of commercial products and services. "We have the infrastructure in place and have proven it works, so if we get one more chain, I think the rest can happen. For example, the expense management providers can step up to the plate."
Most expense providers do not see taking in hotel e-folio data as a major challenge, but not all offer the capability.
Emeryville, Calif.-based Extensity recently added the functionality for the newest version of its Extensity Expense Reports.
"The challenge is getting the data to flow through from the merchant hotels," according to Elizabeth Ireland, senior vice president of marketing for Extensity, which is awaiting the close of a deal in which it will be acquired by Geac, a Canadian software firm. "If asked, we can take the data. It takes some engineering work and we invested in advance so we'd be ready. It's a matter of creating a space in the data model to be able to accept all the fields."