Keeping up with travelers’ access to lodging content and the multiple suppliers competing to offer it is enough to keep any travel manager awake at night. With Stay by BCD Travel™, the new approach to managing hotel programs, the programs yield more value with less effort by offering savings opportunities, shopping and booking and price assurance solutions. [/vc_column_text]
Savings beyond sourcing
Seasonal sourcing has long been the primary approach for managing hotel spend. But incremental savings are shrinking, so the value isn’t commensurate with the effort. In addition, business travel patterns show most companies send travelers to cities where they don’t have enough sourcing leverage with hotel suppliers. The result: a non-competitive negotiating position and missed savings. BCD recommends most companies reduce negotiated hotels and use other spend-management strategies that improve savings and traveler satisfaction.
Program adoption
Stay by BCD Travel brings advanced digital marketing strategies, consumer behavior expertise and an award-winning digital experience to hotel programs. The goal is to influence travelers’ buying decisions and win their loyalty. BCD’s vast inventory of over 1.4 million unique hotel properties comes from a variety of sources, including traditional global distribution systems, hotel booking agencies and aggregators. BCD integrates the content into all major online booking tools, enabling merchandising and improving efficiency and the traveler experience. Travelers have easy access to a range of rooms and rates, building their confidence in the corporate travel program.
Successes
Guiding travelers toward smart buying decisions is proven to yield more value with less effort. For example, one of BCD’s clients, a global medical technology company, reduced negotiated hotel markets by 55%. Instead, the company set hotel target rates as spending guidelines for travelers. Through that switch alone, the company achieved 4.9% incremental savings in those non-program markets. Another client, a well-known food manufacturer, drove up hotel attachment by 139% year over year through a carefully calculated traveler awareness and adoption campaign.
Hotel experts
“Great hotel programs are nothing if you don’t drive adoption,” said April Bridgeman, senior vice president of BCD’s new global Hotel Solutions division. “When you focus on bringing people into the program and invest effort into spend management strategies beyond sourcing, you’ll achieve materially better results than traditional approaches. It’s time to shift resources to strategies proven to add more value.”
Bridgeman also leads Advito’s consultancy group. She reports to BCD Global Chief Operating Officer and Chief Commercial Officer Mike Janssen.
“Hotels are the most critical battleground for customers,” Janssen said. “They represent the second-largest spend category in travel and are increasingly the measure by which programs succeed or fail, whether we’re talking about savings or satisfaction. Our innovative, data-driven hotel approach helps travel and procurement managers win this battle.”
