THE DEBATE OPEN BOOKING
There’s much hype around open booking, but is letting employees book travel how they want and with whom they want healthy for your travel programme, or are the negatives too great? A consultant and a TMC offer their opinions
CAN OPEN BOOKING REALLY WORK? Lesley Turvey
Gary Hance
Co-owner of business travel consultancy, 3SixtyGlobal
I BELIEVE THAT with a new generation of corporate travellers who don’t want to be told where and what to book we must adopt more traveller-centric policies. An open booking strategy allows travellers to tap
into rapidly developing technology, smartphone apps, supplier promotions and distribution options in order to make the best purchase for a particular trip. Airlines and hotel sites such as
Booking.com and Expedia have tools that make direct booking easy. How often do you hear "I can find it cheaper"? With open booking they can book it themselves and the internal noise reduces. I would not suggest tearing up your travel policies.
Total open booking is still in the concept stage at the moment and will remain so until further development of supplier technology addresses data and traveller duty of care issues. An open booking strategy will only be successful
with the ability to pull bookings made outside of policy into your system, giving visibility of your spend and access to traveller tracking and duty of care no matter where that travel is booked. To achieve this you will need to engage additional suppliers and enhanced technologies to pass data from bookings made on their proprietary sites. Open booking can work well alongside a managed programme. Where there is volume and
substantial discounts offered by suppliers the bookings should
continue to be directed through that
supplier and distribution channel to ensure that discounts are maintained. Travel that was previously unmanaged, invisible spend and low-value spend can be booked elsewhere via the appropriate distribution channel on the appropriate app, website or other platform. The speed of technology today means that there
are new apps and new distribution channels opening daily. It doesn’t have to be all or nothing, it’s about starting to explore that technology. Ultimately, I believe corporates should embrace open booking. The key is to maintain visibility of bookings for duty of care purposes and for monitoring spend.
Director of Operational Improvement and Yield, The ATPI Group
IN THEORY, open travel sounds appealing, with the potential to offer both savings and traveller autonomy as business travellers are allowed to take responsibility for their itineraries and modes of travel. However, how practical is this in reality? And how successful can it really be for business in the longer term?
“In the case of disaster recovery, will a business traveller be happy to wait in line along with fellow online booking customers if their flight is cancelled?”
When examined more closely, it seems open travel
has a long way to go and can leave huge gaps in travel programmes in terms of travel policy compliance and corporate social responsibility. And let's not forget the significant cost to business when executives spend their time playing travel agent, rather than focusing on the day job. Not only does that impact on productivity, but
compared to a TMC, are executives qualified to negotiate on the fares shown online? Likewise, in the case of disaster recovery, for
example, will a business traveller be happy to wait in line along with fellow online booking customers if their flight is cancelled? In today’s digital world time is money, but even the
best online tools cost time and money. Especially when compared to sending a short email to a dedicated agent or travel management company with the expertise and insight to effectively coordinate booking details with traveller data and payment methods. It seems to me that the one plus one of open travel
often equals more than two in terms of saving time and money – a sum that business owners and travellers alike must consider before employing it as their preferred method for booking and managing their corporate travel needs.
24 THE BUSINESS TRAVEL MAGAZINE
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