“You have to capture the data.”
At the BTN Tech Talk in Chicago in May, Norm Rose of Travel Tech Consulting reiterated a point that many travel managers know all too well. When travelers book outside of your hotel program, you have to find a way to capture the data.
Why?
Without complete travel data, you can’t contact a traveler to ensure their safety if there’s a fire at their hotel. Without complete travel data, you don’t have a full or accurate view of your travel expenses. Without complete travel data, you lose leverage when negotiating with suppliers if you can’t prove you have the annual volume needed to secure the largest discounts.
What are your options?
You certainly can reconcile data from your travel management reporting, credit card data, and expense data, but that wastes a ridiculous amount of time. According to Sabre, travel managers spend on average 40 hours per month reconciling data. The average travel manager is paid $99,786 per year. That means they are paid nearly $24,000 (480 hours multiplied by $49.83) simply to reconcile data.
A better solution
Hotel compliance has typically been a challenge, but there are new opportunities to grow hotel bookings and capture your travel data through your TMC reporting. CWT’s hotel solution, RoomIt was designed to increase compliance by offering travelers the rooms, rates, amenities and incentives they want at over 800,000 properties through your corporate channels, including agents, your online booking tool (OBT), and the CWT to Go mobile app.
A CWT manufacturing client in Europe was able to increase their hotel attach - instances when travelers book their hotel together with their flight - by 14% within a year of offering full RoomIt content because travelers could book hotels at locations not previously available. Most clients see a hotel attach rate increase of 6% when RoomIt is enabled in all channels.
Clients who participated in the Loyalty Booster program, which awards travelers with bonus points on in-program stays with preferred hotels, saw the rate at which travelers booked hotels and flights together, increase an average of 12% during the promotion, and an additional 3% in the two months that followed.
RoomIt content combined with Loyalty Booster can raise hotel attach by an average of nearly 20%, while increasing traveler satisfaction.
