Feature: Booking hotel accommodation
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making small group bookings. It also has StarChoice which rewards ’non-professional’ bookers such as secretaries and PAs with points to redeem for free nights. Money considerations aside, there is also another reason why some bookers from smaller companies just prefer to book a hotel direct – good, old fashioned relationship building. A company may always use the same tried and trusted hotel close to their offices and see no reason to introduce a third party. Hilton’s Roberts says, “If you are a PA, you might enjoy speaking to someone at the hotel and being recognised by them. The hotel might be across the road from the office and it may seem peculiar to have to call an agency miles away to get them to make the booking.” Or it may be that a hotel is just not on the global distribution systems. Institute of Travel and Meetings chief executive, Paul Tilstone, explains, “Some hotels just aren’t on the system and while many HBAs and TMCs still cater for booking these, others don’t, or the fee for doing so is higher and in those cases booking direct may be best.” Finally, hotels are making it easier and easier
to reconcile payments. Accor’s business account allows bookers to pay for all the room nights that have been used by different staff and clients in one monthly payment. Payment is by direct debit, it’s all online and the system yields management information. Premier Inn also offers a business account
card which now provides the company with a £200million turnover. It offers the booker six weeks credit and can break down spend on everything from F&B to wifi usage.
CASE STUDY
CLAUDIA Hunt is the office manager at Watford-based animal feed wholesaler Arkady Feed and organises all the hotel room nights for staff and clients. She works out that she books a fifth of her room
nights direct and the rest through an agency. Why? “If I am booking one or two room nights in London for, say, people coming up from head office then I would use an agency because looking through the internet is just too time consuming. It’s not really about cost of the rooms – because I can often get them just as cheap myself – it’s about not having to waste time looking for the right hotel,” she says. “But if I am doing an event, customer entertainment
or something where 20 rooms plus need to be booked, I will search for a venue. If it’s a creative thing, where I am looking for something different, I set about the task myself. In the past I have asked an agency to help on an event and they have only found rooms too far from the event. They have told me this is all they can find and then I go looking and find something much better.”
MEETING IN THE MIDDLE In reality, small companies are just as likely to book both directly and indirectly, as it suits. ITM’s Tilstone doesn’t think there are any more direct bookers than in the past, just that they are more visible as the importance of consolidating travel sits under the spotlight. Or, as he puts it, “a bit like the government discovering more crime as the police become more effective!” Hotels do make it very easy to book direct, but
then they would because they are delighted to have the business, whatever channel they get it through. It’s in their interest to have a direct relationship with the client for marketing purposes, but every hotel group The Business
Travel Magazine spoke to said they simply want to make the booking path as smooth as possible for everyone – agent or direct client. Try as the TMCs might, there will always be a sizeable chunk of small companies who just don’t want to be tied down to a contract with a third party. Many don’t have travel policies and are loathe to get into bed with one company to book all their travel. There are also those who simply think their business is not big enough to warrant attention. However, if you really don’t want to get involved with paying lots of extra fees for more agency services than you actually need, you’ll find that many HBAs let you get on with it yourself using their self-booking tools. “There's a lot of smaller companies out there
that are missing a trick,“ says Jon West, managing director of HRS, who explains that any individual can access its basic portal aimed at leisure users but, crucially, that any company who registers with the HBA can access its basic corporate portal with room rates that are five to 30 per cent less. There are no fees for corporates, who can upload their own negotiated rates and, of course, enjoy real-time availability and access to 170,000 independent hotels worldwide that the GDS do not cover. There is no volume or spend requirement and users get basic MI. “If you’re an ’s’ of SME then you have a link
into the corporate site. It looks a lot like the leisure one but has the corporate rates,“ says West. “If you’re an ’m’, or a multinational, then you can load your own negotiated rates and build in policy on a more advanced corporate interface. All users get access to our corporate
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