HRG To Unveil Integrated System: Mega TMCs Respond To End-To-End Travel Technology Offerings

The Queensland state government in Australia in the next few weeks will take delivery of HRG Online, a fully integrated online booking and expense management tool developed in-house by the travel management company HRG. Paul Saggar, director of technology product development for HRG, said he expects it to be available to U.S. clients by the third quarter of 2007 at the latest.

HRG Online claims to be the first integrated reservations and expense offering from a travel management company, but it follows a trail blazed in the past year by the expense management specialist Concur and the booking tool provider KDS. This latest addition deepens the question of whether corporate customers should opt for the new generation of integrated systems or continue to source booking and expense management tools from separate providers.

The near-finalized version of HRG Online demonstrated at the Business Travel Show in London last month exemplified—in principle at least—the potential benefits of integration. Travelers can see the status of trips and expense reports side by side, make bookings that flow immediately into expense reports and learn how to use the entire system in one sitting. Other benefits include a single user profile, a single set of policy rules and complete reconciliation and reporting. Travel managers and budget holders have full visibility of what has been spent and is about to be spent.

The three other major global travel management companies—American Express, BCD Travel and Carlson Wagonlit Travel—said they have no plans to introduce anything similar. Instead, they see themselves as integrators who join up best-of-breed booking tools and expense management tools on behalf of clients.

They also argued that introducing a single booking and expense management tool may not be as attractive a proposition as it first looks. Many businesses would be reluctant, if they already have either a booking or expense tool, or both, to get rid of them. In any case, HRG's rivals said, the very Web 2.0-type technology that has been used by the likes of HRG and KDS to create their flexible, integrated offerings also makes it much easier to integrate independent tools through a single interface.

The other TMCs pointed out as well that linking booking and expense reporting is just one aspect of end-to-end automation. They prefer to work on other links in the chain that they believe more meaningful to clients. In the case of American Express, this is through adding new subcategories of travel purchasing—including parking, shipping of travelers' equipment to a hotel or conference venue, dining and videoconferencing—to Axiom, its version of the Rearden Commerce e-commerce platform. In the case of Carlson Wagonlit, priorities for 2007 include merging agency and corporate card data and sharing synchronized traveler profiles with third parties, such as card companies and providers of security tracking and booking tools.

Despite such doubts, both Carlson Wagonlit and BCD agreed that closer integration of online booking and expense management is imminent.

"It's pretty new but there has been more discussion and activity in the last 12 months," said Mark Williams, vice president of global business development for Advito, the consulting arm of BCD. "It's not an 'I've got to have,' but the fact that some companies have 80 percent online booking adoption rates means it is something they now want to see."

Pauline Quéré, senior director for program optimization at Carlson Wagonlit, said: "Integration is clearly the way forward, but is it a priority for our clients? Not yet."

HRG Online was built using Microsoft .Net 2.0 architecture on the Biz Talk 2006 platform. The demo version shown in London extends beyond booking and expense reporting to trip approval workflow for managers. It covers the entire lifecycle of a trip, so the distinction between booking and expense tool becomes almost meaningless. In effect, the booking becomes the expense report, to which other costs are imported automatically from card expenditures and then topped off with out-of-pocket expenses. Making the booking creates project codes and the entire report can be flowed through to SAP or any other enterprise application.

Once the booking is created, it is sent to whomever has responsibility for approving the trip. The approver can build in financial tolerances in case the flight or hotel needs to be rebooked. The tolerances allow the rebooking to be made without the need for reapproval, as long as the new cost does not exceed the limit set by the approver. The approver also can set limits on the total expenditure for the trip. This information is sent to the traveler to see what has been approved, changed or declined.

"There is a dynamic exchange of information to cover, for instance, changing a trip that has already been approved," said HRG's Saggar. "The booking and expense modules talk to each other all the time."

The front end of HRG Online is independent of any global distribution system and HRG business technology and development director Bill Brindle claimed it could be used to book such non-GDS products as taxis and limousines.

Saggar said HRG Online also would be TMC-independent. The system can be purchased by companies that do not have HRG as their TMC, while those businesses that are customers of HRG's TMC division can continue to use the technology even if they move to another TMC.

Despite the apparent synergies, there are skeptics who believe an integrated tool is not the Holy Grail of travel management. Chris Reynolds, director of the U.K.-based consultancy 3Sixty, told a Business Travel Show seminar he would prefer to pick the best booking tool and the best expense management tool rather than rely on one supplier. Rivals of HRG, Concur and KDS go further, claiming it is impossible for one company to have sufficient expertise to reach world-class standards in both fields. "If you put everything in one tool, you will get average functionalities in both," said Pierre-Emmanuel Tetaz, general manager for France's leading expense tool provider, Etap Online, which used the Business Travel Show to mark its U.K. debut.

Tetaz said an independent expense tool is better able to combine data from offline as well as online sources and that Etap can provide interfaces to online booking tools. "Our vision is to have open interfaces with all self-booking tools," he said. "Using application programming interfaces, we can create and update profiles in the same way as an integrated product."

Andrew McGraw, general manager for North America and head of global account sales for American Express, agreed. "With the new Web 2.0 architecture, we can publish an API and let our customers integrate," he said. "The user interface would remain the same. I don't see any additional benefits in the combined booking and expense reporting tools."

McGraw argued that unstitching tools woven into the corporate fabric would cause too much upheaval. "Our large clients have spent tens of millions of dollars on enterprise applications," he said. "There are not enough synergies to say, 'This is worth dismantling everything I have rolled out to thousands of employees.' "

Williams concurred in part with McGraw's analysis but was unsure that booking tool providers and expense reporting providers would be willing to devote resources to writing APIs, even though the technological challenge may be straightforward. "Concur had enough clients to make it worth writing an interface" with Cliqbook, the booking tool that Concur acquired last year, said Williams.

Carlson Wagonlit sees the uptake of online booking as still too low in most markets to make an integrated product a priority. "Eighty percent of all our transactions are offline at the moment," said Quéré. CWT sees the TMC as the nexus of integration but Quéré is less bullish than her rivals about the ease with which independent booking and reporting tools can be brought together. "Development of the technology has been slow," she said.

Instead, Carlson Wagonlit is focusing on integrating agency and card data for better comparisons between booked and actual data. "It is on our road map for this year to make this global," said Quéré. "We have it in some countries, and some clients already have it internationally."