Feature: Booking hotel accommodation
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available rate. We don’t want to lose that account so of course we are going to give it.” Which brings us onto another reason why
some travel managers and PAs have been wooed into booking direct with suppliers throughout the recession – those amazing best available rates on the day. During hard times, hotels have been operating energetic dynamic pricing policies and have been flooding the market with cheap deals that are hard for people to resist. So why spend time with a complicated negotiated hotel programme via an HBA or TMC when rates on the day can look so attractive? Compliance has never looked so hard to achieve when employees only have to turn on their computers to be bombarded with great deals. This has been a growing issue during the recession, according to Carlson Wagonlit Travel, which has highlighted in a report that business travellers’ mistaken perception that they can get a better deal personally by looking online is a major barrier to compliance. Why is it a mistaken perception? Well, headline low rates often lack flexibility, mask hidden extras like breakfast and may be for a hotel that is unsuitable for business purposes. There may be a minimum night requirement and inhibiting cancellation policies to boot. It’s also worth noting that hotel rates are now hardening and those lovely best available rates may not be so low forever. TMCs and HBAs would add that there’s nothing like the warm feeling of a guaranteed negotiated rate when
hotels start putting up their rates once again. Hilton’s Roberts adds his own words of caution here too. He explains, “I would say that anyone doing business in the premier gateway cities like London has already had the experience that if you are doing any kind of volume it’s in your best interest to negotiate a corporate rate and not rely on rates on the day.”
MAKING THE MOST OF MI Third party bookers have always underlined the importance of using their services in terms of the amount of management information that they can garner for their clients. But increasingly we are seeing hotels offering their own MI services to direct bookers. Premier Inn has for some time offered MI.
Says Kerslake, “In a way, we act like a hotel booking agency in that we offer our clients management information on their spend. We also try to help corporates with compliance and we have doubled our sales team from 12 to 24 so that sales managers can get out there and talk to clients about how they can get employees to stick to travel policy.” Jurys Inn’s Cannon says the group's clients
get MI online when they use the corporate online programme, while Accor’s Stevenson says, “Bookings are tracked against a corporate ID number so we can then give the corporate management information which will help them
“Compliance has never been so hard to achieve when employees only have to turn on their computers to be bombarded with such great hotel deals”
learn how they buy room nights as it’s often the case that SMEs come to us and don’t know anything about their hotel spend. “They can look at travel trends and where they have
booked most and we can then take the contract to the next level, informed by the MI that we have gleaned. We can do breakdowns on individual travellers or as a whole. We have been doing this for five years. We know providing MI is very important and we provide monthly reports to clients,” says Stevenson.
LOYALTY PAYS Let’s not forget, of course, the role that loyalty programmes play in all this. Jurys Inn has just relaunched its corporate bookers reward scheme, Jurys Rewards, which allows travel managers to book online using their negotiated corporate rate or the best available rates and earn five points per booking. Points can be exchanged for room nights or high street store vouchers. Comments Jurys Inn sales and marketing director, Gill Harris, “We just wanted to make it easier for bookers to earn points.” Accor’s Stevenson, meanwhile, says the hotel giant has been considering a loyalty programme for travel buyers in order to create a CRM for its direct bookers. Starwood operates its Preferred Planner programme which directly rewards those ➔
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