WHO CAN HELP YOU AGGREGATE DATA FROM OUT-OF-POLICY BOOKING CHANNELS? CONCUR
OPEN BOOKING Concur intends to launch phase one of its Open Booking solution by February, allowing travellers to forward trip itinerary emails to Concur, which will parse the data into its management information system. Phase two, scheduled
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GDSX’s Trip Link, Steinke has been instrumental in developing. Scott Gillespie, the US-based consultant who coined the term MT2.0 along with fellow consultant Evan Konwiser, urges buyers to monitor development of these tools closely. “The technology is not robust yet but I am confident it will be in a year or two,” he says. “You should not expect technology to be a barrier.” Instead, what will continue to prove a barrier, he believes, will be corporate cultures fearful of devolving control to travellers. Whether travel managers will perceive a value to changing is not yet clear. KDS, another of the data aggregators, reports mixed views among its customers. Vice-president for product strategy Oliver Quayle reckons 80 per cent of his clients won’t switch, but 20 per cent, especially those based in the US, will. Where there is more general agreement is that companies must make their travel programmes more traveller-friendly. Even if they don’t fully relax rules on how and what employees can book, they should, in O’Connell’s words, try to be more carrot than stick. By keeping travellers happy, the thinking goes, they will comply more readily with policy and feel motivated to make smarter buying decisions at point of booking. So every travel manager needs to decide: will they be a revolutionary, an authoritarian, or somewhere in between? ■
for June at the latest, will tackle accommodation. Concur believes the biggest compliance and tracking problem clients face is hotel bookings, of which it estimates half are made outside policy. Concur is negotiating the creation of application programming interface (API) links to take booking data feeds from major hotel chains’ websites. The technology will require travellers to click on the chain’s logo within the Concur tool and on the chain’s website as well to set up the link. Once the link is established, data will be forwarded regardless of which device the traveller uses. Vice-president of global
travel product and strategy Pierre-Emmanuel Tetaz says Concur has no plans to capture airline data in the short term. “Our customers aren’t talking about air, they are talking about hotel,” he says.
GDSX
TRIP LINK US company GDSX’s tool Trip Link also aggregates data from email confirmations forwarded by travellers. In addition, GDSX is setting up direct connections to air, hotel, car hire and rail supplier sites. GDSX CEO Cindy Allen says the first connection has been established with a car rental company website – if a traveller logs on to the site using a recognised loyalty programme number, the booking data can be forwarded to Trip Link. GDSX aims to bring the technology to Europe.
KDS
MAVERICK KDS started work on Maverick in early 2012, but subsequently switched to technology already developed by the US company Procure App. Maverick works on different principles from the tools described above: it is an application that companies programme into employees’ personal computers, which can detect any attempt to book through unofficial channels on that device. Maverick can respond to the attempt according to travel manager preference,
including: preventing the reservation and switching the booker to the official booking tool; warning the booker the reservation is out of policy and offering to switch to the official tool; asking the booker to enter a reason code to explain their unofficial reservation; ensuring the booker is using the most appropriate unofficial site – for example, the corporate version of a supplier’s website, not the consumer version; or capturing data for the reservation made through the unofficial channel. Maverick currently operates for a limited number of direct supplier websites, mainly airlines. KDS says making the tool work for third-party websites – for example, Expedia – would be harder. There are personal data privacy issues to consider when using Maverick.
CARLSON WAGONLIT TRAVEL
WORLD MATE CWT has said it will use its recently acquired mobile trip itinerary tool World Mate to capture data from the itineraries of bookings through unofficial channels. Further details are not yet available.
WHICH COMPANIES ARE READY FOR MT2.0?
Budgets and satisfaction
Priority Savings and policies High and tight Source: Scott Gillespie, Managed Travel 2.0 Company policy-control culture Low and light No Maybe Yes