If it were not already established, the recent selection by Lockheed Martinof an online-originating travel management company proved that the likes of Travelocity Business and Expedia Corporate Travel are here to stay. One of the original customers of the latter, Akamai Technologies travel and meetings services manager Terry Sullo, isn't looking back.
Asked this week to name the detriments of working with ECT, Sullo said, "Honestly, I would have to make something up."
But Sullo may be more accustomed than many to change. The growth of online travel has transformed her job. Before deploying ECT in Aug. 2003, Sullo said, her working hours were about evenly split between meetings and travel management. Now it's more like 70-30 in favor of meetings.
Travel is making a bit of a comeback, though, as Sullo committed to globalize Akamai's travel policy as well as card and agency services by the end of the third quarter. "So I'm sweating rocks here," she joked. Ideally, the global agency consolidation would single-source the incumbent, ECT, but that vendor is operating in just a handful of countries. "We're looking at Expedia's options, primarily in Europe, but the door is open to look at others," said Sullo.
Sullo believes the travel manager's key role is to ensure his or her organization is properly positioned relative to industry changes. As such, simplifying the granular opens time for planning the strategic. Policy, for example, is one of the travel management functions on which Sullo spends the most time, but the new global policy is as simple as they come: bullet points on a single page (not including procedural descriptors).
"The way things are changing, it's sometimes like lemmings falling off a cliff, but the lead guy turned around," said Sullo. "We try to make sure we're keeping up with things, but that users aren't confused. We try to avoid the policy du jour or supplier du jour. Our expectations of users are clear and visible. For example, on availability [screens], we remove as many biases as we can, so people can pick what they need for the business trip. It's more about getting them to think about what best serves the business purpose."
The source of one of Sullo's biggest frustrations in recent years was the Web-only fares debate of 2002 and 2003, when some airlines' global distribution system agreements allowed them to discriminate against GDSs with low-fare content placed only online. Airlines and GDS companies resolved their differences through three-year agreements that are now expiring, and the latest developmentsare showing it's possible that fare or fee discrimination will resurface.
Rather than try to manage every possible channel, Sullo said she aims "to make sure the agencies I use have multi-GDS [capability], to make sure that if the switch has to be switched, it can be. Agencies play a critical part in a company's management of travel; they carry the weight of the function." Expedia over the past two years has added to its Worldspan GDSrelationship by signing contracts with Amadeus and Sabre.
Still, Sullo said, Akamai keeps an eye on the development of direct-connect airline and hotel tools, even using them on occasion. For meetings, she said, Marriott has put a rate code on marriott.com for attendees to make reservations.
"Is that a step toward using marriott.com [for transient travel]?" Sullo asked herself. "It could be, but I wouldn't want to try to coordinate air with hotel. Some of the absolute best agencies are the smaller and midsize ones--they are running fabulous operations--and there are enough of them that one has to have some faith that common sense will prevail in our industry. All this chasing around after direct connections ... are people thinking they'll get a 20 or 30 percent discount? No."
Yet, "chasing around" is exactly what some travelers want to do.
"One thing that still drives me crazy is what I call the bake off," said Sullo. "Every once in a while I'll get a user who says they can get a better fare somewhere else. It becomes an opportunity to point things out, for example, 'We don't expect you to take the lowest fare, we expect you to take the right trip.' " Anyone can beat a price, she suggested, if they have four hours to do the research. "Clearly, we want value, but we are not chasing after every whim of yield management, because that's a losing battle," Sullo added, noting that she finds it "amazing" how many companies do alter policies based on short-term pricing changes.
Instead, Sullo prefers to make time for staying on top of industry news and trends, which she said is both the most time-consuming and the most important part of her job.
"It requires a lot of reading and networking that none of us have time for anymore," she said. "But without it, you can't possibly set strategic direction. The senior management team doesn't want to have to think about what's happening in the travel industry and how they should set policy or take advantage of trends. And you cannot outsource that. There are some high-level consultants who can do a very good job on retainer and with frequent visits, etc., but in my company's culture, it wouldn't work because the pace is too fast and user demand is too high. You need a satisfied user base internally."