Travel buyers usually choose between one of two approaches
for implementing travel management technology: build the technology within
their organizations or find a third-party supplier with the technology they
need. WellPoint manager of strategic sourcing for meetings and events Cindy
Heston prefers a third way: have those third-party suppliers adapt their
technology to meet her company's needs, an approach she has used during the
past few years to transform airline booking, hotel rate auditing and meetings
sourcing.
On the air side, Heston leveraged her relationship with
WellPoint's agency, Travelocity Business, and booking tool, GetThere—both then
under the Sabre umbrella—to shift traveler booking behavior to reflect "the
cost of the trip, not the point of sale," she said.
Knowing that elite frequent-flyer status comes with
cost-saving benefits—free checked baggage and lower change fees, for
example—she analyzed agency data to see which WellPoint travelers had attained elite
status with airlines. In airline negotiations, she sought to bump up to elite
status travelers who were close to such thresholds with a preferred carrier.
With that data, Heston shifted her program so that when such
travelers logged in to the booking tool, they crossed into another version in
which they were given a wider range of freedom in booking on the airline with
which they had status even if it did not offer the lowest airfare available. By
tapping into airline data that showed zero transaction data—instances where a
traveler checked a bag at no cost, for example—she could demonstrate how that
lowered the overall cost.
Heston also analyzed her agency and booking tool's data and
technology to enhance WellPoint's hotel rate auditing capabilities. As it was,
if a traveler was booking and only one out of five preferred rates in a city
was available, she had no way of knowing when a traveler picked that property
that the other four were not available. That had ramifications when it came to future
negotiations.
"A traveler, from a policy standpoint, is not going to
select those hotels, because it says 'out of policy,' " Heston said. "So,
it goes undetected, and the hotelier comes back and says, 'You never used my
hotel. I'm going to increase your rate.' "
Using screen-scraping at the point of booking, Heston now is
able to collect data about the properties a traveler did not choose: the rates
and room types that were available, along with the length of stay the traveler
was seeking, for example. At first, the level of data Heston received was
overwhelming, but she was able to pare it down to actionable data with which
she could notify hotels should they continually fence travelers out of
preferred rates.
For meetings, Heston worked with meetings tech supplier
Cvent to develop template contracts for preferred hotels to simplify the
procurement process. That contract is pushed to the property for approval or
rejection of a potential meeting, rather than starting with a request for
proposal. That not only frees up Heston and her team from a resource
standpoint, it also gives planners the ability to work with hotels directly,
she said.
"It's looking at the experience of the individual in
the organization and how we can enhance that with technology and give them a
little more freedom, but in a very contained workspace," Heston said. "They
feel like they're out there in the Wild West, but really, it's all controlled."
This report
originally appeared in the Sept. 2, 2013, edition of Business Travel News.