Hotel RFP Hell: Is the End at Hand?

Let’s agree that all our friends and colleagues who are in the midst of yet another grueling hotel RFP season should have our sympathies.

You’re dealing with big chunks of invisible hotel spend, crappy data on the visible spend, clunky RFP tools, tedious back-and-forth negotiations, last room availability promises that won’t be kept, and disgruntled hoteliers only too happy to poach your travelers with squatter rates that they’ll offer as long as it suits them. Ugh.

Oh, yes – you’re also facing one of the toughest negotiating environments in what, a decade? Ouch.

Speaking of decades, we know you’ve been putting up with this predictably stressful process year after year, for what, two or three decades?  Gag.

Hang in their, friends, for the future is much brighter.  I saw a glimpse of it at the Beat Live conference in D.C. last week.  But fair warning…you’ll need to grit your teeth and open your minds, as it’s not an easy pill to swallow.

Two pills, really.  The first is TRIPBAM; the second is dynamic pricing.  Here’s how they get you out of the hotel RFP desert:

On Concur’s Future

It’s easy to be a Concur critic these days.  But “these days” ain’t the same as “in the future”.

I attended Concur’s annual customer event, Fusion, this week.  Let’s start with the negatives:

• Concur clearly knows their user base has been frustrated by poor SaaS lately.  It’s a major sore point with customers, and a central issue for management. Will management make good on these promises? TBD.
• Concur is playing catch-up with KDS on making expense reports easier to write, and making the booking process easier to use. No signs this year of any breathtaking innovation.
• Understandable concerns about how the acquisition by SAP will affect Concur.
• TripLink, Concur’s key to closing the gap on unmanaged spend, is stuck in low gear. Lots of sales, very few proof points of it adding value – yet.
• Palpable angst from TMC execs about the future of their business models in the face of TripLink’s potential to enable off-channel bookings.

So if you’re not a fan of Concur, stop here, because the rest of the story is much brighter. 

SmartTrip Delivers Shared Travel Savings – Bravo!

Travel managers have a powerful new tool to coax more savings from their travelers.

Runzheimer’s new SmartTrip tool solves the problem with a simple equation:

Good Trip Budgeting + Traveler Self-Interest = Shared Savings

How it works:  The traveler enters the most basic of trip specs: Origination, destination and dates of travel.  The tool produces the trip’s benchmark cost (a best estimate), split out by Air, Hotel, Transportation and Meals. Yes, these estimated costs can be tailored to fit company travel policies, so for example, the estimated hotel costs can be based on 3 star properties, not 4 stars.

With the trip’s benchmark cost in hand, the traveler

ProcureApp’s Clever Compliance Tool

Disclosure: I’ve served  ProcureApp as an unpaid advisor.

Procurement folks hate undiscounted spend.  They’ll love ProcureApp.  Why? Because it detects when a buyer (think traveler) has wandered onto a non-approved supplier’s website. When that happens, a friendly message pops up.

“Pardon me, old chap.  Couldn’t help noticing that you’re on Brand.com’s site.  Not really an approved supplier, are they?  Tsk, tsk. Why don’t we take a nice stroll over to our approved travel site, and do our shopping and booking over there, shall we?”

Beautiful.  A timely message displayed to a traveler at a critical step in the path of non-compliance. Complete with a link to the preferred site.

“Book It” Will Spark Travel Value Engines

Book It, the oh-so-clever service from Short’s Travel, is a game changer.

Book It makes the “Shop anywhere, but book it here” concept practical for corporate travelers.

Travelers can use any website to find an itinerary and fare they like, then send that flight info to Short’s via e-mail.

The Book It system looks up the traveler’s corporate profile, presents relevant travel policies, applies the corporate discount, and with 3 clicks from the traveler, books the flight.

This “Shop anywhere, but book it here” model is incredibly powerful.  It eliminates

Short’s Book It: A Brilliant Booking Breakthrough

Short’s Travel, arguably the most innovative TMC in North America, has done it again*.

Book It** allows a corporate traveler to search for airfares on any site, then e-mail the selected flight info to Short’s for booking and en-route servicing. Completely automated. Fast results.  Pure genius.

Why pure genius?  Because, according to
David LeCompte, Short’s president, some two-thirds of corporate travelers are shopping for their airfares on non-corporate websites anyway. Once they find a good flight, they have to re-enter the details into their corporate tool.  Newsflash – not every traveler bothers with that last step.

Then there’s the small problem that consumer OTAs are

Travel Search Innovation – the Next Breakthrough

My, what a contrast in travel innovation. The first two presenters at today’s PhoCusWright Travel Innovation Summit were Hipmunk and Evature. Both focus on simplifying the travel search process. Pay attention to the implications for corporate travel.

Hipmunk is focusing on de-cluttering the results of a traditional travel search.  It integrates air and Amtrak rail options into flight searches, and combines hotels with AirBnB results. Hotels are presented with geo-heat maps to highlight shopping, dining and vice (really). Beautifully done.

Evature says hooey on traditional travel search – too many point and clicks, radio buttons, sliders, etc.  Solution?  Semantic search, aka free (unformatted) text.  “Summer beach vacation for about $600 per person”  Think about how time-consuming that search is in today’s OTA world.  Same for business – typing  “Day trip to Chicago next Tuesday” has to be easier than getting those parameters into a self-booking tool.  And yes, Evature accepts speech, just like Siri.

So Hipmunk is simplifying the structured travel search process, while Evature is handling the complexity of simple travel searches. A fascinating contrast in travel innovation.  Who will win?

My prediction: Free text/free speech trumps structured search.  Speaking is easier than typing, especially in a mobile world.  Imagine a corporate booking tool that uses Evature or Siri-based search capability.  That will be a true next-generation breakthrough in the self-booking space.

I wonder who will be the first to bring speech-based search to the corporate travel market?

(Update: The day after this post, Evature was named as the grand winner by judges at the Travel Innovation Summit)

Watch the full set of travel innovation presentations by registering for free here: http://pcwi.phocuswright.com/PC11-online-ticket.html\

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Direct Connect By Google – Oh Yes

It’s a simple formula. Google Flight Search + Airlines’ Hunger for Direct Connect = Trouble for GDSs.

You may think Google Flight Search is just another meta search tool.  I think it is a major step in a campaign to build direct connections between airlines and travelers. Google Flight Search is GDS Bypass personified.

Google sees the GDSs as fortresses, producing hundreds of millions of captive airline searches beyond the reach of any search engine. Searches that need to be freed. Searches that should have the right to be completed directly with the supplier. Searches that in their basic form can be served up quite nicely with Google Flight Search.

But the campaign is far from over.  Airline products are

An Open Approach to Travel Distribution?

Travel managers, watch this 2-minute video about the benefits of open API systems, and then ask yourself how it could – should – be applied to the travel industry:

To me, this video makes the point beautifully that open systems create unlimited opportunities. Closed systems, bounded by definition, can and do create value – but which type do you really want to bet on?

Let’s consider the case of direct connections (DC). As I told an audience last week, American Airlines has done an incredibly crappy job

Why Hotels Need Bar Codes

Talk to anybody who has tried to clean up corporate hotel data, and you’ll know they hate doing it. It’s a pain in the butt to take a company’s hotel booking data from its TMC, and merge it with the company’s paid hotel data from its corporate card.

The first and arguably hardest step is to normalize the hotel identities. Somehow, you have to recognize that a credit card transaction at the “Marriott Courtyard in Salt Lake” should be tied to the reservation made at the “Courtyard by Marriott in Saltlake City”.

The variation in hotel names, as captured by the travel agencies, GDSs and credit card providers, is nothing short of maddening. And we’re not