Industry Vets And A Newbie Muse On Travel Management Metrics That Matter
Some travel management pros see service level agreements with travel management companies as pretty much worthless. SLAs can be hard to measure or validate, and they produce little actionable information. Others view SLAs as integral parts of TMC relationships. Without them, how do the two sides baseline performance, uncover service deficiencies and track improvement?
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IBM, Travelport Ready Blockchain Service For Commission Processing As Smaller Firms Also Make Progress
Travelport has agreements with “major” hotel and travel management company partners to pilot a hotel commission tracking and collection system using blockchain technology from IBM. Travelport chief architect Mike Croucher said during a Monday interview that he would be disappointed if the initiative did not produce a working solution this year.
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Tripbam Automation Will Relentlessly Bug Hotels Violating Deals
One of the most frustrating aspects of hotel relationships for corporations is that the better the negotiated rate, the more often it shows as sold out. Hotels tinker with room inventories and in the process sometimes violate contracts stipulating last-room availability. Tripbam is testing a program that alerts hotels when they fail to live up to these commitments.
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Corporate Travel Executives Struggle To Make Sense Of Latest Investments In TripActions, And Its $4 Billion Value
Corporate travel executives are thoroughly baffled by what a quartet of venture capitalists see in TripActions. Determining the literally unbelievable $4 billion valuation that TripActions claimed last month must have been way more “art” than “science.”
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Discovery Inc. Saves With SAP Concur’s TripLink, Sans TMC Support
Since its inception, SAP Concur’s TripLink program has drawn concern from policy compliance-minded travel managers. They were well aware that lacking inventory in preferred travel management companies or online booking tools created program integrity issues. With some content, especially conference hotel rates, simply not in those channels, many said yes to the TripIt-style email parsing component of TripLink. But the supplier-direct website booking version still generated unease. Managers worried that permitting supplier web channels opened the door to noncompliance. Many still do.
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IBM Gets Patent On Travel Planning
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office last week issued a patent to IBM for “intelligent travel planning.”
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With UK’s Business Travel Direct And BA, SAP Concur Flies Through NDC Headwinds
For SAP Concur, NDC is a “mess,” a “grey area,” and a “huge job.” But there is progress. That includes a recent implementation in the United Kingdom with British Airways and a Business Travel Direct client.
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