Champagne was poured, cupcakes were devoured and South African vuvuzelas were blown at the George R. Brown Convention Center this week.

Attendees of the annual National Business Travel Association convention, which ended Wednesday, were in a celebratory mood as corporate travelers start to hit the road again.

“Today, business travelers are leading the recovery,” said Pablo Yunis,a LAN Airlines vice president of the Americas and the Caribbean. The South American airline’s employees served wine and champagne at their trade show booth while detailing plans to add the Boeing 787 Dreamliner to their fleet next year.

Compared to last year’s convention in San Diego, participants felt more bullish about the industry.

“Year over year, this has been a more energized convention,” said Blake Goodwin, a vice president for SouthLake-based Travelocity Business. Employees doled out the company’s signature gnome in squeezable toy versions to attendees.

Nearly 6,000 people attended this year’s convention, during which corporate travel agents met with officials from hotels, airlines, car rental agencies and other travel companies to negotiate the travel rates and policies for the year.

Asked by Continental Airlines CEO Jeff Smisek if their companies plan to increase travel budgets next year, many people in a morning audience raised their hands.

Several air carriers, including Qatar Airways and Emirates Airline, touted plans to buy more airplanes.

“There’s quite a dramatic difference this year,” said Tony Hughes, Qatar’s senior vice president for the Americas. “There is definitely a huge increase in confidence.”

Flights are increasingly crowded, in part because of more passengers. But it’s also because airlines cut the number of seats in the air over the past two years as sales fell.

“Seat availability is at a premium,” said Mary Ann Harvey, vice president of the Americas for Wings Corporate Travel, a global company that coordinates travel for the oil, gas and marine industries. The South African firm gave visitors purple vuvuzelas, horns made popular during the recent World Cup.

Upbeat signs for hotels

Some hotels are also getting more guests, with rates beginning to increase in the last few months — but not to pre-recession levels.

“They are not strong enough to celebrate,” Best Western International CEO David Kong said, but “I think the worst is over.”

Businesses are still cautious and not booking hotel meetings and rooms as far in advance as they once did, said Bob Cowen, the general manager of the Omni Houston Hotel in the Galleria area.

“We’re having a fantastic year. The market really started to do better for us in March with the rodeo,” said Cowen, whose hotel underwent a $30 million renovation in late 2008 when a ballroom and spa were added.

In the first six months of this year, Houston’s total room bookings through Orbitz for Business increased 45  percent compared with the same period last year, the biggest growth in the nation’s top 10 destinations. That could be attributable to the lower cost of business travel to this region, Orbitz officials said.

Skipping the luxury

Although business executives are traveling more this year, they are not booking luxury hotels or first-class seats, said Frank Petito, Orbitz for Business president.

Travel executives said they are still concerned about the economy and the risk of companies encouraging video conferencing instead of travel.

Use of that technology “got a little bit of a kick-start with the recession. It will never replace travel,” said Andy McGraw, an American Express Business Travel executive senior vice president.

–Jenalia Moreno, The Houston Chronicle. View the original article

He urged delegates to let the Department of Transportation know they support a mandate that there be “full access to ancillary fees” through, among other outlets, GDSs.

“Airline pricing isn’t getting any simpler,” he said. “I’m not here to criticize airlines for charging fees [for unbundled services],” he said. “It allows customers [the opportunity] to buy themseles out of an otherwise bad travel experience.”

In addition to allowing consumers to make apples-to-apples price comparisons, he suggested that having ancillary fees in the GDSs will be in the best interest of travel managers. “They can and should be included in negotions with airlines,” he said. “We’re ready and waiting with the technology.”

In an interview with Travel Weekly, Gilliland said, “We’ve taken cost out of the picture. We’ve been saying all along that it is our intent not to charge for distribution. There is a cost for doing this on behalf of the airlines. We’ve bourne the development and implementation costs because we want to be supportive of the types of products the airlines sell. We just want it to be as frictionless as possible.”

Gilliland said the primary issue he faces is the amount of time it may take to come up with standards that the GDSs, airlines and interested third parties can all agree upon.

“We don’t want to wait as long as it took to get [standards for] electronic ticketing. That took 10 years.”

The GDS chief said that “technology — and certainly not GDS technology — is not slowing anything down. The important thing to remember is that selling a product goes a lot further than booking a product. If you’re selling a $10 product, you need to have a really efficient set of capabilities behind it, for changes, refunds, that sort of thing, or the value proposition will be off-kilter.”

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McKesson’s recent focus on demand management gave the travel program the opportunity to flex its muscles through policy and automation, with the support of its travel management company, Travelocity Business, and its GetThere online booking tool, said procurement travel manager Yoichi Miyazaki.

“The best savings is to talk people out of travel, and the best way we can do that through an online booking tool is through dynamic messaging,” Miyazaki said. “That’s something we have worked on for a little over a year. When hotel choices are listed, we have a message that says, ‘Please do not stay there,’ when it is a hotel that is outside our list of preferred hotels. In one city alone, it increased the bookings of preferred hotels by as much as 10 percent.”

Another example of dynamic messaging, Miyazaki noted, involves booking in advance, a practice from which he said the company finds valuable savings. For those who are booking within seven days of departure, he said, there is a message that asks, “Why are you not booking in advance?” The messaging prompts a dropdown menu of reason codes that are reportable and alert managers, he said.

Miyazaki said McKesson has had a seven-day advance purchase requirement for three years, and that the dynamic messaging made it more visible in the past year.

McKesson, which has a growing sustainability program, also is using dynamic messaging to promote green practices. “Not traveling is the best green option,” said Miyazaki, who also said the company, a launch customer for Cisco’s TelePresence, uses the high-definition videoconferencing technology in four major locations and one dozen smaller ones across North America.

In addition to applying directional dynamic messaging for air and car rental suppliers, Miyazaki said McKesson two years ago began exploring the idea of creating online supplier merchandizing. Since then, he has seen that placing banner ads for specific preferred vendors on the search screen has helped drive marketshare, particularly for a new preferred car rental supplier. Miyazaki credited merchandizing on the site for driving use of that supplier “from zero to 50 percent within three months.”

He also put it to use in driving compliance to McKesson’s preferred airlines. “Because of the coverage that our travelers need, we need a lot of carrier contracts,” Miyazaki said, “but 70 percent of our spend is with preferred carriers. The banner is a really important tool to manage that. There has been a double-digit increase to 78 percent in the use of preferred carriers in recent years.”

He said that he also has made great use of the data the online tool provides. “In this past round of airline negotiations,” he said, “I was able to determine each carrier’s net effective discount, which was a great thing to have.”

To raise compliance, Miyazaki has held monthly webcasts to educate employees and get their buy-in for corporate procurement goals, initiatives and policies.

McKesson spent $43 million in U.S. booked air volume in 2009 and has 32,000 employees. While it has a global travel policy in place, its individual business units can and in some cases do have stricter policies. “Each business unit has a compliance champion with their own goals,” Miyazaki said, “and we work with them to make sure that they get the reporting they need to address it.”

McKesson has a policy of using lowest logical nonrefundable fares, with which 93 percent of its tickets are in compliance. About 92 percent of its tickets are booked online, of which 95 percent are handled without manual intervention through fulfillment.

Miyazaki said another benefit of the tool has been a rise in the reuse of nonrefundable tickets. Today, he said, “71 percent of all nonrefundables are reused. Before we started using the Travelocity/GetThere tool for that, we were doing 50 percent or so.” While happy with the progress, he saw room for improvement. “I think we can do better,” he said.

While using nonrefundables provides overall savings of about 10 percent of McKesson’s air spending, including any penalties for change fees, Miyazaki said that for tickets booked online, use of nonrefundables provides a savings of 28 percent versus refundables. “We have taken this information internally to promote great use of online nonrefundables,” he said.

Miyazaki said that McKesson recently focused on automating non-profile travelers, and 100 percent of recruitment prospects are going through Travelocity Business. He said this created internal savings because for those without changes, “no one has to touch them anymore.”

At the beginning of last year, McKesson also consolidated its two sizable divisions in Canada with Travelocity Business, which from day one showed 95 percent compliance. Miyazaki said the move produced “transaction fee savings of 70 percent and the consolidated buyer power resulted in 3 percent more in discounts for local carriers.”

July 12, 2010
By David Meyer

This story was originally published in the July 12, 2010, edition of Business Travel News. View the original article.

Southlake, Texas (July 12, 2010) – Travelocity’s most recent poll shows more than half of all travelers share vacation information through social media sites. With summer vacations in full swing, many travelers are looking forward to sharing the details of their trips with friends and family. In today’s world, the easiest way to share is through social media, but people should be conscious of when and what they share to avoid giving away too much information about when they’ll be away from home.

Nearly 30 percent of travelers have either never thought about precautions or do not take any precautions when posting about vacation on social media web sites. Twenty-seven percent post limited vacation information; the rest do not allow any vacation posts.

“It’s only natural to want to share your excitement about an upcoming trip on social media sites,” said Genevieve Shaw Brown, Travelocity’s senior editor. “But it’s probably safest to wait until you return to share the details of the trip.”

Travelocity’s tips for safe sharing on social media sites:

• Establish rules about how much you’ll share and make sure everyone in your household is on the same page.
• Never share details about dates you’ll be away or children who will be left home alone.
• Switch off the ‘add location to your tweets’ function if you’re tweeting from vacation.
• Deactivate Foursquare from your Twitter and Facebook accounts so it doesn’t update those sites when you check in.

Tips for sharing upon your return from vacation:

• Upon return – post away! Travel sites like IgoUgo.com make it very easy to share photos and reviews of your travels with the world.
• Upload your vacation videos to YouTube and post the link on Twitter or embed on Facebook so friends and family can watch.
• Use the geotag function on photo sharing sites like Flickr to show the world where you’ve been.

About Travelocity Global

Travelocity® is committed to being the traveler’s champion — before, during and after the trip – and provides the most comprehensive and proactive guarantee in the industry (http://www.travelocity.com/guarantee). This customer-driven focus, backed by 24/7 live phone support, competitive prices and powerful shopping technology has made Travelocity one of the largest travel companies in the world. Travelocity also owns and operates: Travelocity Business® for corporate travel; igougo.com, a leading online travel community; lastminute.com, a leader in European online travel; and ZUJI, a leader in Asia-Pacific online travel. Travelocity is owned by Sabre Holdings Corporation, a world leader in travel marketing and distribution.

Each year, McKesson selects indirect suppliers to receive awards of Supplier of the Year, Diversity Support, Customer Service, Most Improved, Most Incremental Value, Account Management and Sustainability. Instituted in 2007, the McKesson Corporate Procurement Supplier Scorecard Awards are based on performance in the areas of total cost of ownership, service level agreements and corporate citizenship. In 2009 Travelocity Business received the award for Most Incremental Value, making this the second year in a row the company has been honored by McKesson for its contribution to the brand.

Working in conjunction with McKesson’s procurement team, Travelocity Business helped the company record impressive savings across the entire scope of its travel program. Highlights from McKesson’s hotel and air program include:

• Domestic average daily hotel room rate (ADR) was 15 percent below industry average;
• International ADR was 8 percent below industry average;
• Fiscal year 2010 savings from airline sourcing and optimization with Travelocity Business’s consulting group resulted in $2.6 million; and
• Online adoption exceeding 90 percent for the fourth year in a row.

“I am very proud of our Travelocity Business team for receiving this honor from McKesson,” said Yannis Karmis, president of Travelocity Business. “We have enjoyed working with McKesson to develop a program that fits their needs and will provide the results they require. We continue to use benchmarking tools and data reporting to determine how we can strengthen the McKesson program to drive savings.”

Travelocity Business ranks among the top 10 travel management companies in North America, offering corporations a compelling combination of best-in-class automation and traditional travel management services. As a valued Travelocity Business customer for the past five years, McKesson has leveraged advanced GetThere and Sabre Travel Network capabilities to build a best-in-class program.

About the McKesson Corporate Procurement Supplier Scorecard Awards:

Instituted in 2007, the McKesson Corporate Procurement Supplier Scorecard Awards are based on performance in the areas of; total cost of ownership, service level agreements and corporate citizenship. Each year, McKesson selects the outstanding indirect suppliers in each of the following areas: Supplier of the Year, Diversity Support, Customer Service, Most Improved, Most Incremental Value, Account Management and Sustainability. Winners receive plaques and are honored at an annual awards dinner.

About McKesson

McKesson Corporation, currently ranked 14th on the FORTUNE 500, is a healthcare services and information technology company dedicated to helping its customers deliver high-quality healthcare by reducing costs, streamlining processes, and improving the quality and safety of patient care. Over the course of its 177-year history, McKesson has grown by providing pharmaceutical and medical-surgical supply management across the spectrum of care; healthcare information technology for hospitals, physicians, homecare and payors; hospital and retail pharmacy automation; and services for manufacturers and payors designed to improve outcomes for patients. For more information, visit http://www.mckesson.com.

About Travelocity Business

Southlake, Texas-based Travelocity Business is a full-service corporate travel management company. Travelocity Business is one of the business travel industry’s fastest-growing TMCs, ranking among the top 10 travel management companies in North America. Travelocity Business combines the expertise, service and travel choices of Travelocity(R) with corporate experience gained from serving more than half of the Fortune 200 companies. For more information, companies can visit http:/www.travelocitybusiness.com.