United Airlines has developed a sales portal for both
corporate clients and travel management companies that enables customizable
reporting and self-processing of waivers and other services that previously
required the carrier's intervention.
Set to launch in early to mid-March, according to the
carrier, the United Sales Information Portal in its first phase will offer real-time
reporting on contract performance and forecasts as well as self-service for
penalty waivers—such as when flight operations are interrupted by inclement
weather—and Economy Plus upgrades. Together, those two considerations comprise
the majority of calls to United call centers, United managing director of
worldwide sales resources Karen Catlin said.
The portal also will provide United operational statistics,
including monitoring on how well United is meeting its performance
commitments, and relevant news, such as waivers
that are in effect.
Following that launch, United in the second quarter plans to
add features including corporate ancillary reports and more self-service
options. That second phase also will include an "amenity banking"
option, in which values will be assigned to various contract perks—upgrades and
MileagePlus status, for example—and buyers will be able to shift their selected
perks as their needs change, Catlin said. For example, a buyer who negotiated a
certain number of elite status eligibilities for travelers might decide that
they don't need them all and would rather shift them to upgrades for travelers.
Currently, changing that requires a call to a sales manager and a contract amendment,
but the bank will let buyers do that on their own.
In general, U.S. carriers have been exploring more options
for agent and buyer self-service. Delta's Edge tool, for example, included a
points-based system for clients to manage soft-dollar benefits and waivers upon
its launch in 2014. American Airlines in 2015 launched
Flex Funds through its SalesLink platform, letting buyers and agents
directly access fee waivers.
"United is looking to always be the airline easiest to
do business with and be the best for our customers with the most advanced
technology," United senior vice president of worldwide sales Dave Hilfman
said. "We've created something that's very contemporary, very intuitive
and very powerful."
The portal will replace United's Travel Agency Information
Center, which offers information and some reporting for agents but has no
transactional capabilities. United does not currently have a dedicated site for
corporate buyers. Combining TMC and corporate services into a single portal is
a first for major U.S. airlines, Hilfman said.
Corporate customers provided input for the portal, including
several who have been working with the portal in beta since late last year. One
of those buyers, Allstate enterprise travel director Duane Goucher, praised the
self-service functionality, saying it would especially ease the process by
avoiding calls during irregular operations, when call centers are overloaded.
He also looks forward to tapping into reporting capabilities, he said.
"Once it's released, we can download what we want in
the format of what we want, so we can take some of those metrics to create a
report for the CFO or a PowerPoint presentation for finance," Goucher
said. "We don't have to take a standard off-the-shelf report and rewrite
it."
United will continue to add features to the portal in future
phases based on customer feedback following the launch, Hilfman said. Support
for multiple languages and currencies and an SME product are among the features
slated for future phases.