Colombian paper products manufacturer Productos Familia Sancela S.A. has cut transaction fees by 28 percent this year following an internal marketing campaign that helped achieve an 80 percent adoption rate for newly deployed self-booking technology.
Productos Familia director of strategic resources Juan Guillermo Restrepo Uribe said the company began an initiative to manage its travel expenditures in 2004. About 150 of 2,000 employees in Colombia are considered frequent travelers, accounting for $2 million annual in travel expenditures.
Restrepo explained how rolling out a managed travel program in Colombia presented unique challenges: travel management companies continue to use a commissions-based revenue model, growing airlines introduce new fare classes and restrictions, and new taxes on air tickets create pressure on companies to find ways to cut costs. Moreover, Colombian employees are accustomed to booking travel through an on-site representative of their TMC, he said, making it difficult to implement self-booking technology. The pace at which the industry has changed in Colombia compounds these challenges.
"It has been quite difficult for the traveler to understand that things have changed, and have changed a lot," Restrepo said. "Two years ago, you could make a reservation and you didn't have to do anything with the airline. A day before your trip, you could cancel and nothing would happen. That changed, and it was quite strange for people."
Productos Familia implemented a travel management policy in the beginning of 2005 and Restrepo said he visited companies in Mexico to pick up best practices for installing a self-booking tool. Ninety percent of the company's tickets were available through global distribution systems, but he was told by the largest GDS provider in the country, Amadeus, that he would have to wait.
"At the time, Amadeus said that Colombia was not a country where they were developing self-booking tools," Restrepo said. "You had to be a huge company with a lot of spend to have these tools."
Productos Familia's travel department then researched booking tool providers and chose Sabre's GetThere in mid-2006. It was a timely decision, as the pressure to cut costs became critical in November when the Colombian government announced additional taxes on air tickets that would cost the company an extra $500,000 over the next three years. Furthermore, airline commissions by 2009 will be reduced to 1 percent and transaction fee-based models will become the norm, he said.
Productos Familia had two major goals in rolling out a self-booking tool. The process of booking a ticket through an agency representative had become "messy," he said, and a self-booking tool could issue tickets more efficiently. The second goal was to cut transaction costs by 28 percent and average ticket prices by 5 percent. Restrepo said the company has achieved most of the objectives, though evidence of lower ATPs won't be clear until a report on the program is issued later this year.
While use of the self-booking tool, called "Auto Travel" by Familia Productos, is mandated, Restrepo said the travel department also used an internal marketing campaign to increase adoption, including a series of promotions featuring the phrase: "Be prepared to learn how to travel by yourself." It wasn't until a month into the campaign that employees finally learned the details of the self-booking tool.
"We had a decision to make: to do it through a complete mandate or to invite people to use and enjoy the tool," Restrepo explained. "We made our decision to invite people to enjoy the tool with a companion mandate from the general manager. We really didn't want to do it just through a mandate. We wanted to make it more fun."
A pilot group of the company's top travelers were also given in-depth training on the tool months before the launch, to determine any necessary last-minute adjustments. When the tool was finally unveiled to all company employees, Restrepo arranged for four kiosk computers to be placed in each department. An agency representative was on hand to provide training.
"People were very receptive of the tool and interested in the changes to the travel program," he said.
Now the tool is available on every company computer, and adoption is at 80 percent, Restrepo said. The next steps include bringing the booking tool to offices outside Latin America and building in a pre-trip approval process.
Restrepo suggested other Latin American companies interested in online booking should prepare to spend a year laying the groundwork. "A self-booking tool is a great thing but it's not the only thing you have to do [in travel management]," he said. "You have to have a great policy. You have to train people. There are a lot of things to take into consideration."
The key to adoption, Restrepo added, is to make the tools fun and easy for travelers to use. "You are not asking your travelers to do a boring thing, you are improving the process and making it fun."