October 22, 2008 - Providers of corporate online booking tools are enhancing their hotel booking paths with photos, better mapping, traveler reviews and other bells and whistles in order to capture more hotel bookings and improve product displays for lodging firms. However, travel managers are skeptical, wondering whether the whiz and bang will support basic policy compliance, provide cost savings and offer full access to inventory.
Travelers still tend to book hotels outside of their companies' preferred booking systems. For every 25 air bookings through TRX's Resx, for example, a spokesman said about four include hotels.
Deltek Inc. travel manager Karoline Mayr said the tools are still not where she would like to see them in terms of saving the corporation money. The new features are "slicker" and "more vibrant," she said, but during hard economic times, the corporation is less concerned with property pictures or maps than with compliance and cost savings.
"Right now, some corporations are trying to cut budgets and these tools are not focused on helping us save money in functionality and travel spend," said Mayr. "For the most part, I don't think it will be that helpful, but it is certainly better than it was before. The tool is made for booking. They want to get on, book their air, hotel and car, and get off. I still think that travelers are going to go to a third party to search, like a MapQuest for maps."
Ensuring that travelers book with preferred properties can be challenging, said Julius Yaovi Dakey, corporate travel supervisor for Bechtel Corp. At Bechtel, travelers are bound to government per-diem limits, resulting in some travelers filtering their hotel searches solely based on rate, rather than preferred properties. Tools that are focused on aggregating content from preferred properties in a straightforward approach are preferable, Dakey said.
"If they put anything else in the tool itself, it will become unnecessary," said Dakey. "I believe that all of the information is there already; I don't think having any more interactive functionality will be a plus. [Travelers] should be able to distinguish better when hotels are sold out and on what specific dates."
Thomson manager of worldwide corporate travel Cindy Heston suggested that improving compliance starts from within. "Anything that improves the look and feel of the tool to benefit the traveler is helpful," she said, but "you have to have the policy in place, and mapping isn't going to solve that problem."
Universal Music Group senior director of travel services Pamela Witherspoon said that while new features might help overcome some technical limitations, increasing adoption also depends on her company pushing usage. Maps are a "nice-to-have for those people who are inclined to be attracted to maps," she said.
Of all their concerns, though, accurate access to up-to-date and complete inventory information appears to top the list for travel managers.
Another buyer, who declined to be named, said inventory availability through the tools is a bigger concern than what some of the newer features do. Information on availability is typically loaded into the global distribution systems before corporate booking tools get access to it, the buyer said, and travelers sometimes find there are available rooms when they call properties even though their tool showed them as sold out. "This doesn't help with getting the trust of our users," said the buyer.
"Travelers want as much information as possible at the point of sale in one view to select a hotel that works for that trip," said Deloitte Services LP hotel and ground transportation manager Brian Nichols. "That includes multiple hotels in a single view with location on a map, pictures, actual availability and rate."
Best Western International senior vice president of marketing and sales Dorothy Dowling said travelers are often "going to go onto the branded Web site to get that kind of content. It is an extra step for the traveler, but there is a challenge with the tools being able to deliver on that kind of content."
Online booking tool providers have been pushing for better access to content through the tools for some time, but there was resistance from some hotel companies. According to InterContinental Hotels Group senior vice president of distribution for North America Del Ross, IHG for years wanted to "save" the best content, like pictures, tours and other user-friendly materials, for their Web sites in an attempt to attract more direct bookings. Over time, he said, IHG realized that it was in its best interest to ensure that the customer is booking regardless of channel.
"Certain content and certain photos would be limited because we wanted our own direct sites to be better, and we didn't fully think through the needs of our guests," said Ross. "It didn't help us, and it certainly didn't help our partners who were trying hard to represent us well, if we were choking off their access or if their own systems couldn't display all of the information that the guest needed to make a decision. We were thinking about our own desires; now we will give any intermediary all of the content and photos and visual aspects they will accept."
"Since most of the self-booking tools are pulling content from the GDSs, that becomes a limitation," said Best Western's Dowling. "Our Web site is extremely rich. We have virtual tours of multiple spots within the hotel that are required, plus we have eight static pictures that are required for every Best Western, and we fund that mechanism for them."
Technology experts acknowledged this problem and said it is a difficult one to resolve. "Air isn't quite as challenging as hotel, because it is not as fragmented. Some hotels don't participate in the GDSs, and you have to be directly connected into the database," said Chad Schneider, Carlson Wagonlit Travel online booking partners product manager for North America.
Hogg Robinson Group director of technology product development Paul Saggar said it is difficult to keep hotel content up to date due to fragmentation in the market, arguably more abroad than in the United States.
Latest Enhancements
• Amadeus' online booking tool e-Travel offers geo-coding to help travelers book hotels nearest to their meetings.
• Concur upgraded its Cliqbook system with electronic hotel folio receipts.
• CWT's Horizon tool now offers maps that allow the traveler to choose a preferred property closest to his or her meeting and uses predictive searches based on the traveler's booking history, among other enhancements.
• Sabre's GetThere booking tool by year-end plans to add pictures, interactive maps and predictive searches, and by 2009 it will include user-generated content and allow travelers to filter their searches by preferred, prenegotiated amenities, officials said.
• TRX launched a new version of its Resx tool that better emphasizes preferred properties and offers panoramic images, videos and pictures.
