What happens at one of the most consolidated global travel
programs when content is not available in preferred systems? "I cut the
traveler loose," said General Electric EMEA regional travel manager Keith
Mullineux. "If they really want to book on Ryanair, they have to use a
personal card and claim the expense back as cash."
Perplexing as Ryanair's approach to corporate travel is for
Mullineux, it is but one hole in a program that for more than a decade in most
regions has provided company travelers a single travel management company
(Carlson Wagonlit Travel) using a single global distribution system (Sabre), a
single corporate travel self-booking tool (GetThere), a single airline data
service (Prism Group), a single corporate card (American Express) and a single
expense management system (Concur).
All that consolidation greatly simplifies travel operations
for the multifaceted company, which has about 100,000 travelers. But in the
Middle East, GE has been forced to select KDS for online booking and HRG
partner Dnata instead of CWT. In Russia, local travel agencies and a local GDS
are in the mix.
"On balance, by putting in the same processes, you'll
have more positive gains than negative outcomes," Mullineux said as he
outlined the basic practices of his company's travel management program in
recent meetings hosted by The BTN Group. "Our experience is that if we can
apply consistent and standard processes and practices across the globe, and
particularly in Europe, that's the real key in reducing operational cost and
keeping that side of things under control. We find this works, and people
expect that a large global corporation has global processes, policies and
practices."
Single sourcing in this way is virtually synonymous with
globalization itself for some multinationals, while others prefer a
multi-supplier approach.
GE enjoys high self-booking tool adoption, north of 80
percent across Europe. "We want to minimize the number of transactions
going through agents, because that's where the meter is running,"
Mullineux said. When the meter does run, "we do not want agents coming out
of Sabre and going onto other websites to make a booking because that would
decimate our productivity. That's how we see life on air, and it's much the
same with hotels. If the hotel isn't prepared to participate in the GDS, then
it's not realistic for us to book them through our agency channels, so we have
to be pretty blunt about that. Otherwise, we would spend a lot of time handling
transactions inefficiently.
"Of course, if the inventory isn't there, our travelers
are quick to pick up that they can find it elsewhere and then come back to us
saying we're not doing a particularly good job," Mullineux said. "So
it's critical to us to have complete inventory in the GDS. The equation for us
will only work if we can see 80 percent or so of our bookings made with no
touch by an agent on a self-booking tool.
"Ryanair?" Mullineux repeats when asked about the
unorthodox Ireland-based carrier. "Ugh, Ryanair—I'm almost speechless
about Ryanair! They don't want to accept Amex cards. They don't want to distribute
through the tools we have. It's almost as if they're telling us they don't want
to do business with us. Yet they do go from strength to strength in their
annual results. We'd just love for them to make it easier to book with them.
But at the moment they're making it incredibly difficult. Just think how much
more successful they might be if they appeared to be more user-friendly to the
business travel community."
The Country Problem
Despite being unable to eradicate exceptions like Ryanair,
Mullineux said he would not change the approach. "Clearly you have the ups
and downs, but it's not about changing the process; it's bringing other
countries onto the platform. You have to acknowledge the world is not a
homogeneous place. I mentioned the Middle East. I also have real problems in
deciding what to do in Russia and Turkey. It has to do with content in the
GDS."
A Dnata hub in the United Arab Emirates using Sabre
ultimately will also serve Bahrain, Jordan, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar and Saudi
Arabia, though Jordan and Kuwait now use Galileo. "After all this is
stabilized, we’ll start to look further afield, e.g. Iraq and North
Africa," Mullineux noted. CWT serves the region through partnerships.
Ideally, GE would put all travel operations into one of its
regional CWT/Sabre service centers in Beijing, Phoenix and Warsaw. But in
Russia, the conglomerate currently uses local agencies and is considering a
multi-GDS setup, which is "alien to the way we're structured
elsewhere," Mullineux said.
GE decided it would "create a hub in Russia where we're
at the moment using three agencies. We want to consolidate that down to one,
turn them into a best practice and serve not just Russia but the other
Commonwealth of Independent States countries as well. But it won't happen overnight.
We're taking a two- to two-and-a-half-year view on straightening it out. We
have the issue of TMC presence there—they are generally affiliations rather
than run directly by the household name you might know, and affiliates can be
more difficult to manage. We know that by experience.
"Language isn't the problem," Mullineux said.
"My hub is in Poland, [where] all the elder agents went to school and
learned Russian. It's their second language, so that's not the particular
reason. The real reason we're going to deliver [locally] in Russia is the fact
that we have to use multi-GDS. Much of the domestic airlines do not distribute
through Galileo, Amadeus or Sabre—but perhaps to [Russian reservations system]
Sirena, and we don't particularly want to be riding two horses because our
experience is that you fall off when you try to do something like that. We'll
be asking our people in Russia to have their travel delivery locally, where we
can access international fares through Sabre but also domestic fares through
Sirena."
GE this year also is moving to introduce Concur and the Amex
card in Russia despite a high degree of financial regulation and paper
processing.
Mullineux On
Mandates, Methods And Multinational Management
Mullineux detailed several other aspects of GE's program and
his experiences implementing it in throughout the world:
• "Everything's pretty well mandated in the policy.
Most people know to keep their heads down and get on with it. You don't want to
be seen as challenging policy and doing things like that."
• "We pay the agency on a cost-plus basis. It's still
twice as high as in North America, but it's about as good as it's going to get
in Europe."
• The Amex card program is "corporate pay, and I could buy
myself a first-class ticket, but it would be career-limiting. People just don't
abuse the system."
• "It took a little while to crank things up in Spain.
It was probably cultural. People in Spain would much prefer to see their agent.
It was not unusual to have our businesses using the agent that was on the
ground floor of the office block we're in, and this would have been normal 10
years ago in Spain. Even to move it to a more central location in a city like
Barcelona or Madrid would have raised eyebrows, and to think about moving it to
a central European location and to introduce technology to make reservations
came as quite a shock. It took quite a while, but it's largely over now in
Spain."
• "In France, the difficulties are more imagined than
real. There is a perception that the government might want various documents in
certain formats, but it's never difficult for us to find a business there that
has gone paperless or touchless. People will warn you that they'll want to
speak French, so I will lay on more French speakers in our operational center
and then find they're not needed. International travelers in France are going
to speak English just like anyone else."
• "In Germany, the requirements are more real than
imagined. Domestic airfares have to be supported with the original paper
invoice. It can't be printed off a link. It has to be delivered locally. The
address has to be 100 percent correct and match the legal business entity. Now
they're running well, but it is a non-standard process we have to
recognize."
• "In Sweden, we found they were very comfortable using
the [MasterCard] Eurocard—so much so we're allowing them at the moment to
continue. I believe there are a variety of reasons. Expenses are linked with
payroll, we had good acceptance, and we had bigger fish to fry elsewhere."
This report
originally appeared in The Beat.