E-Mail, Web Become crucial
Even optimists would be challenged to find a bright side to the horrifying terrorism that the nation suffered two weeks ago in New York and Washington, but corporate travel managers resoundingly praised the airlines and other suppliers for using e-mail and the Internet to keep companies and travelers up to date on the latest developments. It was these newer tools, and not the older telephone and fax technology, that were functioning best on and after that horrible day. And it is these tools that have come of age as the industry's primary source for critical information.
"We had almost hourly updates on our intranet site," said Michael Hall, corporate travel manager at Johnson Controls in Milwaukee. "And the airlines have been marvelous in talking to us and getting information out on ticket exchanges, schedules, etc. That information changed by the minute."
Anton Bronner, chief of travel and transportation service for the United Nations in New York, said, "One thing that struck me was that several airlines provided immediate and constant e-mail messages," he said. "That was excellent."
One company even used e-mail as a way to begin the process of getting travelers used to the fact that travel will change. "We've been cutting and pasting the various Federal Aviation Administration messages into communiqués," said Michael Brooks, senior vice president of general services for Republic Mortgage Insurance Co. in Winston-Salem, N.C. "We placed bullet points on recommendations and what they should expect at the airport, and we called it 'The Changing Face of Business Travel,' just to get them into the thought process that things will change."
The only complaint about airline communications reported to BTN was that some of the airport staff were uninformed of the applicable policies. They may have been too busy to check their e-mail.
Prospects For T&E Vendors Already Were Bad
While the Sept. 11 tragedies likely will impact the airlines more than any other industry, other vendors in corporate travel also are in dire straits, including the automated expense reporting business. The end of August brought the end of expense reporting system vendor InterPro of Pleasanton, Calif. Though not a major player in its sector, InterPro did maintain a number of sizable accounts, including CT100 member Medtronic of Minneapolis. "Our funding pulled the rug," said vice president of strategic sales initiatives David Gould, who is working to transition clients back to the company that originally wrote InterPro's Expense Express software, Scottsdale, Ariz.-based Ad-Soft. The InterPro news was reflective of the larger struggle that expense software vendors have been facing, in which many are trying to figure out how to survive as independent entities. According to Gould, things can't be any easier these days for other expense software sellers than they were for InterPro. "I don't know what the future is for the whole industry," he said. "Corporations can't go back to paper, but even the market leaders have a huge hurt on."
There have been plenty of painful signs at publicly traded companies that must report financial information, such as Redmond, Wash.-based Concur and Extensity of Emeryville, Calif. (BTN, July 31). Concur, which claims more than 800 partial or enterprisewide clients, has had a stock price of $2 or lower for all of 2001. In its latest quarterly earnings announcement, the company reported a loss of $7.8 million, and that was a "tremendous quarter." And yet, according to BTN's annual survey of the 100 largest corporate travel accounts—as well as additional data obtained from vendors—Concur is the leading provider among the 61 CT100 companies that acknowledged selecting an expense reporting tool for U.S. operations. With 17 of those accounts, Concur is atop a fragmented business. The next most popular configuration was 14 CT100 companies with internally developed systems, followed by Captura with seven accounts, IBM with five, Gelco, Extensity and SAP with three each, Oracle with two and other vendors with a total of seven.
The expense management industry needs consolidation, but it appears to have nowhere to go. Maybe T&E vendors would be better off if they were acquired by traditional players, but it is probably not wise for anyone to make acquisitions right now. Not only is T&E a miniscule part of many potential buyers' business, but those companies now are dealing with their own busted financial issues. In the wake of the tragedies in New York and Washington, companies have far bigger things on their minds.