Consolidating hotel spend with a hotel booking agent
CHARITABLE FOUNDATION WELLCOME, which aims to improve health around the world, has around 650 regular travellers – a mix of employees, grant holders, meeting delegates and committee members – who spend around £4 million a year on travel. Wellcome, established in 1936, has pledged £5 billion over the next five years to fund scientists and researchers. The organisation books around 4,000 room nights a year, more than half of which are in London. Travel manager Rod Richardson runs the request for proposal and manages the rate negotiations for the programme. The organisation’s travellers are empowered to make decisions best suited to their circumstance and there is no pre-trip approval process in place. Wellcome’s preferred channel for hotel bookings is through corporate booking specialist HRS, with which it has worked for the past three years. Travellers book their own travel within the set policy and compliance is in the low 90s. Some 82 per cent of the hotel spend goes through HRS, says Richardson. He says he chose to work with HRS because of the breadth of its content, the ease of use of the site and the ability to load the London net rates into HRS. “We have an agreement that a certain percentage of the revenue must be commissionable to them. The remainder could be net-net corporate deals,” he says. Although HRS has strong hotel content in the UK, Europe and the US there are some gaps, such as in Africa, where Wellcome has particular need. Hotel spend has traditionally been handled through billback because Wellcome had been reluctant to issue corporate cards for anyone other than very senior staff. Yet it was far from an ideal solution. “It was a nightmare to reconcile,” says Richardson. “On most days I was having to process between six and ten invoices. They all had to be processed, signed and sent to accounts payable. At some points, it was overwhelming.”
As a result, Richardson wanted to streamline the payment solu- tion while limiting the risk of fraud and enabling new employees, contractors and other infrequent travellers to be better controlled. Wellcome’s previous travel management company (TMC) introduced the organisation to virtual cards and Airplus’s AIDA solution in particular. Hotel spend is now billed cen- trally by HRS using AIDA. The introduction of virtual cards gave rise to several clear benefits: reconciliation has become much smoother; it has reduced the risk of corporate cards being compromised in high-risk regions; and it also means that employees would not be left without funds due to theft or curtailment of a trip or other delays. The high quality of data produced by the card scheme gives Richardson better visibility of end-to-end costs. However, the decision to mandate virtual cards faced some re- sistance from travellers initially because of loss of certain benefits, such as loyalty points and cashback.
94 BBT September/October 2016
There are also some acceptance issues still to be resolved. While virtual cards are widely accepted by reputable travel suppliers, Richardson says that in some markets, investment is needed to get suppliers to accept and understand the technology. Some hotels still require a hard copy back-up, for example. Richardson has advice for other travel buyers looking to get control of hotel spend. “The key thing is to ensure the reporting that comes at the end is what you want. When we started working with Airplus it wasn’t returning the reporting I needed and it took some perseverance to get the reports in the format we wanted.”
What’s new in expense management
• Concur has inked a deal with taxi company Gett that lets UK travellers select their corporate card and send the expense direct to Concur. Users will also have access to Gett’s fixed fares, giving them up to 30 per cent off.
• Chrome River has announced a new technology integration with Traxo. Chrome River Expense will now be able to parse a hotel bill in English and most major foreign languages to extract line item data for the room, taxes, food and room service.
• Expensify has rolled out its Price to Beat feature, which shows users the average price paid for similar
bookings made on the same day. Administrators can reward travellers whose rates are below the average.
• Expensify has also launched an initiative called Receipt Burner with partners including Uber and Hoteltonight. Bookings made through these and others will now flow straight into Expensify.
• Fraedom has launched an online booking and expense management tool called Fraedom OTE in Australia.
• Sabre’s recently announced mobile platform, which integrates Getthere, Tripcase and its virtual payments solution, is to use Chrome River for expense management.
BUYINGBUSINESSTRAVEL.COM
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