■ ONLINE HOTEL RESERVATION SERVICE Hotel.info has struck a deal with travel and expenses specialist Conferma. The agreement will see TMCs that use Conferma tools getting access to Hotel.info’s content of more than 200,000 hotels. Conferma commercial director Shaun Hinds said: “This means that many small, owner- managed hotels and smaller hotel chains, not connected to the traditional booking systems, can now be booked, settled and reconciled through Conferma’s solution.”
AMADEUS UPGRADES MOBILE
“IMPROVED COMPLIANCE” is one of the key features of Amadeus’s new mobile offer, with tests due to start by the end of the year. “We will launch a mobile version of the Amadeus E-travel Management (AETM) tool,” said Rob Golledge, head of marketing at Amadeus UK. “It can be synched to corporate policy to ensure that any bookings made on the road are within policy.” He explained this will increase compliance by ensuring that preferred suppliers are prioritised. “Also, the traveller will be able to make these changes him or herself, which lessens the workload for the TMCs,” he said. Amadeus research found that TMCs spend nearly as much time changing reservations as they do making them. The new tool will initially be available as an iPhone and Android app.
IN CONVERSATION…
Guy Snelgar, head of business development, Get There
Rob Gill talks to Guy Snelgar about the evolution of Sabre-owned booking tool Get There, and the latest online and mobile booking trends
How has Get There’s
booking tool evolved in the last few years? We started as a tool to bring costs
Guy Snelgar
down because an online booking is cheaper than a manually processed one. Now we have developed into a travel management tool. The system can
show the traveller whether they should book certain hotels or the cheapest flights. It can also include approval rules, profiles, department codes and preferred suppliers.
AVIS
What’s your latest strategy on using mobile technology?
LAUNCHES PORTABLE WIFI HOTSPOT
CAR RENTAL FIRM Avis is piloting a mobile 32
connectivity service for customers at Edinburgh airport. The small device (pictured left) gives users internet access for up to five devices at once. It costs £8.50 per day and means inbound international travellers can avoid roaming charges. The service is pre-bookable online, and for outbound UK travellers the service is already available at Avis rental offices in several German airports including Berlin, Munich and Frankfurt. Avis Budget UK managing
director Kaye Ceille said: “We hope customers will take the opportunity to try this new product, which is a cheap and convenient solution to keeping in touch.”
Get There mobile allows users to do everything on the move that they can on their desktop. It runs through a mobile browser, which we think is better than an app as it is updated every six weeks or so.
What are the next steps in making your products more attractive for the business traveller? The big development is to make the corporate booking tool as appealing as the ones that are available in the leisure market. We’re working
on personalisation, and are trying to bring in a ‘recommendations’ option. This would allow the tool to suggest hotels based on the traveller’s profile; if it recognises that they like to go to the gym, it will recommend the hotel with the best gym facilities.
Any other major developments planned for the next few months and years? We are working with Sabre Virtual Meetings to create a GDS for videoconferencing options. This would enable the booking of meeting rooms and videoconferencing
suites in one interface. It is currently in the ‘beta’ phase, and will evolve over the next two or three years.
Would this reduce the amount of travel that firms will do in the future? It’s offering the option to book a meeting room and avoid an air fare, not to replace travel entirely. We believe that companies will travel the same but may choose alternative options for some types of meetings, such as internal ones. They can choose when it’s most appropriate to travel and use the travel budget for the meetings that really matter.