Egencia hotel study highlights savings opportunities for corporate buyers

NEW DELHI - Egencia, a company offering expertise in corporate travel management, has prepared a study that focuses on savings opportunities for corporate buyers through better monitoring, compliance and management of hotel reservations.

The company, which is a part of the Expedia Inc. group, has found four significant components that affect overall travel spends. These are:

1. Common areas of leakages in cost to corporate buyers

2. Opportunities for cost savings

3. Value of establishing a strong policy structure

4. Strategies to effect optimization and control

According to the study,companies in India lack visibility and ability to control international hotel reservations made by their employees.

Hotel bookings generated internationally from corporations in the region are estimated to exceed five billion dollars and constitute a significant component of travel spend.

The study says that generally for multinational Indian companies, the spend on hotels is almost equivalent to their air ticketing expenses.

It states that some of the common challenges confronting Indian enterprises are:

1. Absence of a structured and defined hotel booking policy across the enterprise

2. Limited compliance and exception management capability

3. Visibility and oversight on the use of the lowest rates by travelers

4. Lack of automated access to negotiated domestic and international preferred hotel rate contracts through a single mechanism across the enterprise.

5. Significant manual intervention required from the travelers and travel managers to make hotel reservations - Increases employee time cost spent in booking hotels.

6. Inability to direct hotel reservations to key preferred hotel partners - both domestically and internationally

7. Tendency to allow travelers to book their own hotels subject to a overall per diem

This last challenge, if not tackled effectively, results in leakages due subjective buying practices, ensures fragmenting of corporate buying power and prevent a company from deriving long term year on year savings through a preferred hotel partner program.

The study also says that there is very limited or nil reporting and management information available to corporate buyers in the domain of hotel reservations.

They are largely dependent on their hotel partners for this data, if at all available.

It also says that limited or nil visibility to track employees in disaster and/or emergencies as the reservation mechanism used is largely manual and done individually. (ANI)