Op-Ed: E Puribus Unum: Cooperate To Advance Travel Mgmt.

The original motto of the United States,"E Pluribus Unum" is Latin for "One from many" or "One from many parts." It refers to the welding of a single federal state from a group of individual political units—originally colonies and now states. Centuries later, we can still apply this concept to our travel industry, hopefully with equally successful results.

The current business travel industry is a fragmented global infrastructure that lacks the full integration and cooperation necessary to maximize traveler productivity and the corporate return on investment from a managed program. A cooperative effort among suppliers and buyers will improve returns to those who invest in the requisite improvements.

The first area of cooperation is the concept of a comprehensive global distribution system; there is no such product. The current model lacks full content, yet moves money around from suppliers (airlines, hotels, car rental companies) to distributors (travel management companies) and at the end of the day it is the corporate client that pays for this compensation model. We would better serve our industry if we were to trade the current compensation model for a more robust product that contained full inventory of all suppliers around the world, without bias or barriers to entry. The economics of this model would change in that an end user (corporation) would pay for such a product, and the benefits are full content, and no "leakage" by having travelers "shop the Web" for a better fare, hotel rate, etc.

I would liken this to standard TV vs. cable. Right now, the corporate customer enjoys their global distribution system for "free," but in the end the lack of content costs them in lost productivity and noncompliance. As a former travel manager (and agency owner), I would rather pay for a comprehensive GDS than get $1.50 per segment and have to go outside the system to find the carrier that met the needs of my traveler.

The second area of collaboration is on the hotel request for proposal process. We have seen numerous attempts to standardize the request for proposals form to no avail. The progress to date has been admirable, but we are still requiring hotels to fill out dozens of data fields (thousands of times), and most of those fields never change year over year (address, phone, number of floors) and even fewer are ever actually made available to the traveler. My recommendation is to simplify the process:

•Each hotel property fills out a standardized hotel form once, and posts it on their Internet site (password-protected)

•Corporate clients can download the entire form and need only negotiate on rate and amenities

Clearly, the above is a more efficient process, and allows the properties to concentrate on relationship selling, instead of treating each property like a commodity when, in fact, each hotel has a unique combination of architecture, amenities and staff. There is no reason why a hotel salesperson needs to generate one of these forms for each client, and worse, use different forms depending on which entity is issuing the request for proposals.

My third area of focus is the global payment system for airline tickets. We have a very effective program in the United States under what formerly was formally the Airlines Reporting Corp., but the ARC system is limited to U.S. point-of-sale ticket stock, and can only settle payments in U.S. dollars. Outside of the United States, we have the International Air Transport Association bank settlement plans, but IATA's BSP network consists of more than 70 entities that are not using a common data and settlement platform, even though they are all part of IATA. The challenge of the program is the inability for a corporation (or travel management company) to effectively consolidate all travel spend on a global basis.

If we can, in fact, integrate the ARC and the IATA bank settlement plans, all we have to do is find a way to include those carrier sales that do not process via IATA/ARC (i.e., low-cost carriers) and find a way to integrate that data into a complete, and accurate corporate database of total airfare spent (and flown) on a global basis.

We have an obligation as an industry to provide an accurate representation of our economic system, and corporations have a right to know where their funds are flowing, and how to account for debits and credits, especially in a global economy. Admittedly, this is a lot to ask, but the benefits far outweigh the cost of process improvement. We are not making a request on behalf of only 13 colonies—this system impacts billions of dollars in dozens of countries, for millions of people.

Let's not forget the motto of the American revolutionaries: "United We Stand, Divided We Fall."

Andrew W. Menkes is CEO of Princeton, N.J.-based Partnership Travel Consulting Inc.