Carlson Wagonlit Travel president and CEO Douglas Anderson today said that booking softness previously limited to the United States widened to Europe and Asia/Pacific toward the end of the first half of 2008 and accelerated in the second half of the year.
Anderson also highlighted the rollout of the travel management company's "intelligent itinerary"
(BTNonline, Feb. 25) and the development of an online hotel booking tool to first roll out in Europe as part of a broader hotel effort, among current initiatives.
For the first half of 2008, CWT claimed a 16 percent increase in sales to $15 billion for wholly owned and joint venture operations, fueled by annual 37 percent growth in Latin America, 24 percent in EMEA and 14 percent in Asia/Pacific. In North America, sales volume increased 7 percent.
As U.S. commercial transactions were down in the "low single digits" in the first half, European transactions grew by more than 10 percent, but have since slowed. "It's an area that we have been expecting," said Anderson. "With the sustained and deep slowdown in the United States, it was hard to imagine that EMEA wouldn't be impacted. We'll finish the year with positive growth in Europe, but it won't be low double digits as it was in the first half."
Asia/Pacific's strong flow upward has ebbed as well, as CWT's clients in Singapore and Hong Kong were negatively impacted by declines in the financial industry and some client turnover in the region. "We are a little overweight in financial services in Hong Kong," Anderson said, "but I think the market growth in Asia/Pacific is still reasonably healthy but slowing a bit from what it was in the first half of the year, similar to what we are seeing in Europe."
The interactive itinerary has been in pilot phase in France, Spain, Switzerland and the United Kingdom, where 1,200 have been issued since April. CWT has scheduled a broader rollout for 2009. Anderson said the company was adding new capabilities like airfare class code decoding and enhanced e-mail messaging and text formatting for mobile device itinerary accessibility.
A new hotel booking tool is part of a broader hotel effort for CWT, which increased its booked hotel volume 16 percent year-over-year to $2.2 billion in the first half of 2008. According to Anderson, the CWT Harp preferred hotel program has more than 160,000 properties in its database. The TMC plans to add more non-GDS hotel content to Harp. Over the past year, CWT has opened dedicated hotel booking centers in France, Italy and the United Kingdom, Anderson said.
Anderson today also said CWT and United Airlines have yet to come to terms following their break in July and CWT has "shifted a substantial amount of traffic away from United" primarily to "one of the four big U.S. carriers," he said. "What we have not done is shifted traffic at the expense of our clients. Clients that have negotiated rates with United that have asked us to move away from de-preferencing United for their business, we have done that with immediate effect. We are still shifting business away from United when all else is equal."