An Uneasy Mix for Travel Booking

Incentive: Travel

An Uneasy Mix for Travel Booking
March 28, 2008
Booking and expense systems don't always mesh well

By Amon Cohen

Companies with a long history of using self-booking tools are finding it harder to integrate them with expense management systems than late adopters, according to Amadeus, the world's largest processor of travel bookings. Marcos Isaac, the company's director of corporate and distribution channels, says the problem is particularly acute in the U.S., where online booking became widespread years before it caught on in Europe.

"North American companies that introduced self-booking tools five or more years ago are less integrated than European companies introducing them today," Isaac says. "However, some of them are trying to integrate now because they have discovered they need to integrate with other processes to take out more costs."

Nancy Smith, PricewaterhouseCoopers' U.S. travel leader, concurs with Isaac's analysis. "Strategically, we want to integrate our online booking and expense management to improve efficiencies and reduce process costs, but it is not going to be done with the flick of a switch," she says. "The hardest challenge is that I don't want to take away anything from which travelers are receiving value."

An Amadeus-commissioned survey of 168 buyer members of the Association of Corporate Travel Executives, released at ACTE's global conference in Munich last October, showed only 9% had integrated self-booking and expense management tools. However, another 12% said they have embarked on the process, and Isaac expects the trend to accelerate.

The figures are low, even though respondents see clear benefits in bringing the two together. According to the survey, 62% anticipate a significant productivity gain from integration through reducing time spent on reporting travel expenses. Nearly the same number of respondents expected significant productivity gains from reducing the need for manual input of traveler data and automating the transfer of traveler profile data.

Isaac attributes the low incidence of current integration to the relative high cost of linking booking and expense management tools, compared with other integrations. The benefits are difficult to prove. "The case for introducing an SBT was easy to show to the boss, but if you want to integrate the end-to-end process, you need to show the cost savings all the way along the line," he says.

And not all travel buyers are convinced the pain of integration is one worth enduring. "It's a nice-to-have, but it is not key," says Peter Brodbeck, head of global travel for Syngenta Crop Protection. "If travelers want to do their expenses, they need what they really paid."

After a pilot scheme, Siemens also concluded "it is not the right direction for us," said Sabine Sehrt, the company's vice president of international travel management. Rules governing expenses vary significantly in each country, making the project more trouble than it's worth.

The Amadeus survey, carried out by the U.K.'s Cranfield University, also revealed that 30% of residents had integrated their booking tool with a human resources database and 56% had integrated it into their corporate Intranet, which can help to improve adoption by making processes easier for travelers.

Amadeus believes integration with HR systems improves profile management in addition to the tracking of travelers for security reasons. "You can track travelers without this integration, but the data on personnel supplied by the HR department is much more accurate," Isaac says.

Originally published in Business Travel News (btnmag.com).

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