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SPECIAL ADVERTISING SECTION
The Cyber Traveler Reducing Costs, Increasing Customer Satisfaction 
THE WEB AND THE WORLD As corporations set up travel management programs or enhance existing ones, the cornerstone is an online travel-booking system. There are two reasons why. First, in this new no-travel-agency-commission world, companies that do use an agency to book travel now must pay for the privilege -- usually $50 or more per transaction. Multiply that by hundreds of travelers taking multiple trips, and those fees add up quickly. Prudential, for example, was able to save $700,000 last year just on agency fees by making online bookings. Second, when corporate travelers use the Web to research flight and hotel options, more often than not they'll choose a lower-priced option, even if it means adding some inconvenience, like making an airline connection. There are several major suppliers of corporate travel booking solutions. One of them, Worldspan, offers a turnkey product called Trip Manager, which gives travel planners an Internet-based method for tracking travel purchases and guaranteeing compliance with travel policy. Trip Manager lets travelers create, change or view their air, car and hotel reservations in real time, either via the Internet or a wireless device. It is totally secure and easily linked to a corporate Web site or Intranet. Worldspan customers -- 1,300+ companies with a collective 200,000+ travelers -- are reaping significant savings from Trip Manager. "The average airline ticket purchased through Trip Manager is 10 to 15 percent less than an average airline ticket purchase," said Cathy Spivey, senior manager for travel and meeting services for Home Depot. Cost control, however, is just one of the advantages. The other four of Worldspan's "5Cs" are convenience (Trip Manager is accessible 24/7 from anywhere in the world), compliance (travelers are provided with a wide variety of choices, all in line with company policy), convergence (Trip Manager is easily integrated into existing enterprise systems) and customer care. "None of your corporate travelers will travel alone," said Paul Blackney, Worldspan's president and CEO. "The help desk, consultants, technical specialists and account managers will support a decision to use Trip Manager, from onsite training through network integration through customizing adoption programs that improve usage." PORTAL POWER Using the Web for corporate travel purchases doesn't necessarily mean having to hop from one vendor's Web site to another to complete all the components (air, hotel, car rental, restaurant reservations, driving directions, currency exchange, etc.) of a business trip. Portals of various kinds -- some linked to other corporate purchasing sites, some linked to even broader based B2B marketplaces, some linked strictly to a company's Intranet system -- now give companies a whole new way to manage travel purchasing and T&E expense management. GetThere, a subsidiary of travel reservations giant Sabre, uses secure, high-speed connections to link a corporate Intranet or a Web site to GetThere's online booking and travel management data centers. GetThere manages all of the hardware, software, system upgrades, security, reliability, availability and system growth; it's designed to be a kind of plug-and-play service, only without a large capital outlay for hardware and software. It's also easy to use: employees log onto their corporate Intranet site, and click on the travel icon. From there, it's a few clicks to booking airline, hotel and car. Users also can check prices and availability, compare routes, and make changes to itineraries as well. GetThere is currently integrating in-depth intelligence information into its product that shows travelers up-to-date, highly-qualified information about their planned destination -- health, security, events (festivals, labor strikes, rallies), exit/entry requirements, traffic issues, weather forecasts, etc. With Navigant's Custom Travel Portals, a company's proprietary policies and vendor programs are automatically passed along at point of travel purchase. Navigant's standard travel portal includes an information center with links to often-used sites like MapQuest.com, City Search.com, Weather.com, etc. Customized options include actual online booking, reports on T&E spending and meeting registration. American Express's "superhub" portal lets travelers research, book and buy travel and entertainment from a single Web location. Information partners include Fodor's, Zagat Survey, Travel & Leisure, MapQuest, Playbill, Ticketmaster, citysearch.com and MovieFone. The site is backed offline by a team of travel counselors who can help with questions or problems via e-mail or phone; alternatively, travelers can tap into the company's network of 1,700 travel and foreign exchange services in 130 countries. Highwire, recently acquired by GDS giant Galileo, offers a suite of corporate travel tools that lets travelers plan, book and manage travel on the Web. The company's biggest customer is Microsoft, which rolled out Highwire's Travelport to 25,000 Microsoft employees last summer -- a move that has resulted in an overall savings of 20 percent on domestic airline ticket prices. TOP TRAVEL SITES The online world is filled with travel sites. Here is a list of some of the most innovative ones, all of which offer interesting opportunities for corporate travel purchasing. Yatra, which bills itself as a B2B corporate travel marketplace, pools participating companies into an enormous "virtual buyer." Travel suppliers then target Yatra users with service upgrades and discounts as high as 40 percent. Corporate customers include Siemens Canada, and, interestingly, several small corporate travel agencies that pass along Yatra's purchasing benefits to their clients. About one third of bookings at Expedia, now the seventh largest travel company in the world, come from corporate travel. According to Matt Hulett, Expedia's director of product development, most of this corporate business comes from companies without a full-time travel manager that are turning to online procurement to control the travel-purchasing process. New this year is .NET Alerts, a free opt-in service that allows travelers to choose to be alerted about their flight status at the time that best fits their needs, and via the device of their choice -- cell phone, PC or Mac, or pager. Travelocity, one of the pioneers of Web-based travel bookings, provides Internet and wireless reservations information for roughly 700 airlines, 50,000 hotels and 50 car rental companies worldwide. New is the firm's online concierge service, which allows Travelocity customers to pre-book theater tickets, tee times and restaurant reservations. Orbitz, founded last year by American, Continental, Delta, Northwest and United, offers access to the greatest number of low airfares on the Internet -- its search engine scans more than two billion airfare possibilities in seconds, including the Internet-only airfares of 35 airlines -- plus great values on rental cars and hotel rooms. Sign up for Traveler Alerts, and you'll get a notification (by e-mail, phone, pager or voicemail) whenever there's a delay or gate change, unusual airport congestion, or even stormy weather. Cybermeetings of the Future For anyone who's ever sat through a dull-as-dishwater presentation, scrambling in a darkened room to scribble notes and stay engaged, there's new hope. Meeting rooms at hotels, resorts and conference centers all over the country have undergone a fundamental transformation. Instead of merely supplying a comfortable, well-lit room with a slide projector and pull-down screen, the meeting room of the future is now wired to the hilt with all sorts of interesting equipment to support interactive presentations, Web conferencing and videoconferencing. "Today, as a matter of course, meeting planners are asking for technology that didn't even exist a year ago, and we've got it," said Jim Pribyl, director of convention services for the 778-room Renaissance Orlando Resort at SeaWorld, which has installed a new, high-speed STSN system and videoconferencing capability throughout the hotel. Corporate groups have used the multiple access points in the hotel's 45 meeting rooms to set up their own conference networks at which attendees can follow presentations, check the schedule, and communicate with each other. The technology at the SeaWorld property is available at all Renaissance Hotels & Resorts properties. The company now offers EventCom Technologies by Marriott (the parent company of Renaissance), a one-stop service for any meeting involving satellite, audio, video and Internet conferencing. Call a central number, and EventCom coordinates contracts with multiple Marriott hotel sites, assists with event management, and provides technical and communications support and centralized billing. Hilton Hotels Corporation is also leagues ahead of competitors in terms of hard-wiring in high tech meeting capability. The company now offers T1 lines in all conference rooms in the 220 hotels that it owns. And some hotels, especially in parts of the country with a lot of high tech businesses, are built specifically for a tech-savvy clientele. At the Hilton Santa Clara, in the heart of Silicon Valley, there is wireless Web access from all public areas, including conference rooms, the lobby, lounge, and health club. Meeting space features fiber-optic cabling, allowing streaming video and multimedia presentations. In Texas, near DFW Airport, the Hilton Lakes Executive Conference Center features the futuristic Digital Solutions Room. More than 80 connections for power, voice, data and AV support are concealed under the floor; fiber and Cat5E tie lines connect other meeting rooms at the property, to an office, or to other meeting sites. Layouts can be changed quickly to provide workspaces appropriate to the meeting's objectives, and high-speed Internet access hooks up to Web conferencing services such as WebEx. For customers seeking help setting up small videoconferences, seven Hiltons around the country offer the Hilton TeleSuite Network. These Telesuites, each of which seat up to 12 people, are designed so that participants appear life-size and seem to be across the "same" conference table from each other. Writer: Jill Molyneaux is a business travel specialist and former editor-in-chief of Corporate Travel magazine. Print Design: Sundberg & Associates Inc Illustration: Raphael Lopez Produced by: MeigsMedia, Ltd., Millbrook, NY E-mail: jon@meigsmedia.com www.meigsmedia.com |
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