Editorial: Buyers Take Stage

<B> Editorial: Buyers Take Stage</B>

By David Meyer

Business travel buyers gathering this week at the Business Travel News' Corporate Travel World conference and exhibition are practitioners of a function that is coming of age in the eyes of senior management and through the development of a series of innovative techniques and technologies to consolidate and streamline travel.

The handwriting has been on the wall for years that the industry has been headed in this direction, but now it really is starting to get somewhere. There has been a significant proliferation of electronic ticketing, automated booking, reporting and expense system deployment and implementation of corporate intranets.

The changing financial relationship between airline, travel agency and buyer, spurred by the domestic Commission Cap of 1995 and finally applied to international transactions last fall, has driven the conversion from commission sharing to fee-based agency arrangements. The natural next step that follows shifting more financial and administrative responsibility to corporate buyers is for them to increase their role in dealing with vendors.

In that light we've seen the spread of net fares, the emergence of ARC-appointed Corporate Travel Departments and the advent of direct connections linking buyers and suppliers.

Buyers who seize such opportunities can cut their companies and themselves in for a greater piece of the action.