CWT Revamps Booking Tool With Maps, Small-Group Booking

Carlson Wagonlit Travel this month launched a revamped version of its CWT Horizon online booking tool, with new features including increased hotel and office location mapping functionality, a small-group booking application that links post-ticket data with Carlson Wagonlit's reporting tools and a predictive search solution that targets preferred supplier and policy compliance. In addition, the tool incorporates traveler incentives offered by preferred hotel suppliers for booking online.

While Carlson Wagonlit introduces Horizon releases quarterly, as do other online booking tools, the travel management company is working to align its self-booking tool and its other technology products with the company's overall emphasis on globalization and policy compliance.

"That's a significant theme for us, driven by client demand, and it's even more relevant in the context of the softening global economy where compliance becomes very critical for many of our large clients," said chief information officer and executive vice president of technology and product development Loren Brown.

To help fuel the technology strategy, the company has increased its research and development budget by 10 percent year-over-year while keeping some IT costs at bay by altering its development methodology to quicken product enhancements and updates to monthly cycles, acquiring third-party technology to increase productivity and quality control and outsourcing routine software development, while shifting the workloads of core development employees, enabling them to work on multiple technology projects. "We get more bang for the buck," Brown said. "For the same spend, we get more development capacity."

While some of Carlson Wagonlit's products, including Horizon, are exclusive to North America, Brown said the company is undergoing a "broader strategic review" of its technology portfolio to align it with organizational changes established last year upon the launch of a strategic plan, which focuses on further globalization of processes and products. Brown said the technology team is evaluating the future development of global standards and determining the technology components that fit into that strategy, including Horizon, the Harmony agent desktop and the Symphonie overall reservation platform.

"We don't have a final conclusion yet, but it's safe to say that significant parts of the technology stack will be part of our future global strategy," Brown said.

In two of its large call centers, Carlson Wagonlit is using evaluation reporting software that measures agent performance on a common rating system and provides standard data reports on productivity and quality.

"It's kind of like posting the test scores outside of the classroom, Brown said. "It creates healthy competition among the agents."

In its call centers, the travel management company has introduced new network and Voice over Internet Protocol technology that reduces call recognition time by up to 25 seconds when a traveler enters a personal identification number.

Although the company has grown considerably through acquisition, its increased girth has hindered some technology development, leading to slower product enhancements, releases and broader rollouts, such as the CWT Portrait traveler profile management system, which Brown plans to expand to all travelers.

"We've grown so rapidly through acquisition that we keep making strides, and then we make another acquisition and it takes us backwards and we have to deploy again."