Travel Agencies Advance Hotel Rate Auditing Technology

Recent enhancements to travel management companies' proprietary hotel rate auditing technologies have found more discrepancies and increased rate-loading accuracy more quickly. However, agencies also must grapple with the dynamics of a depressed hotel market with lower published rates than some negotiated corporate pricing, complicating automated rate audits.

HRG is working to integrate its automated rate auditing system with its HRG Point of Sale agent desktop. The integration gives real-time audits of booked rates from the time the reservation is made and continually searches for lower rates until the cancellation window closes.

BCD Travel's Advito consulting arm for the 2009 hotel negotiating season rolled out a new hotel rate auditing tool that checks all global distribution systems, as do other mega agency systems. It also examines seasonal rates and identifies the property amenity information and room description detail associated with a rate. Advito's new tool checks four dates to confirm a rate-loading discrepancy, said vice president of business development Bob Brindley. A previous version examined only one specific date, a process that could incorrectly interpret a sold-out hotel as a rate-loading problem.

When the company identified that it needed a new system two years ago, Advito used a team of agents to audit manually—a more thorough process that is replicated by the new system.

"It was very thorough and accurate, but it was definitely something for that one-year period we were losing the money on, because we weren't able to adjust our prices for the new higher-detailed manual process," said Brindley.

American Express Business Travel since 2004 has used its proprietary Hotel Rate Trax tool, which in August was awarded a U.S. patent. Amex estimates that 35 percent of hotel rates are incorrectly loaded into GDSs.

Carlson Wagonlit Travel's Solutions Group consultancy for several years has used its own rate auditing technology. Recently, the company's multinational clients have increased use of CWT's GDS rate audit rationalization process, which can automatically audit rates across GDSs at multiple points of sale, said CWT Solutions Group project manager Sherie Hermann.

In its first round of audits, CWT this year found that clients had an overall 72 percent rate-loading compliance rate. It can take up to five audits to have more than 90 percent of audits loaded correctly, she said.

Meanwhile, when some published rates and hotel discount offers undercut corporate negotiated rates, rate audit technology could flag corporate rates as being out of compliance because they no longer are the lowest.

HRG director of global hotel relations Margaret Bowler said that with the current hotel pricing atmosphere, the audit process needs to examine the specific aspects included in rates, especially with buyers negotiating amenities and free services into their rates.