Travel Agencies Offer Pros, Cons About Online Booking
Process Emphasizes Agents’ Role as Travel Managers
BY TANYA RODRIGUES
Staff Writer
Trying to hit a moving target.
It’s how Van Anderson describes how travel agents look for the lowest prices for airline tickets.
Anderson, co-president of Escondido-based Anderson Travel & Cruises, was referring to how the fares constantly rise and fall, and availability changes minute to minute.
However, the reference can also be made about ways that travel agencies work with clients, which continue to evolve and develop.
One of the newer ways customers, particularly business travelers, are sending air travel requests to their agencies is through booking systems the agencies set up for customers on the Internet.
The programs can be used through the agencies’ Web sites, or through more customized sites the agencies set up for clients.
Through the various programs, customers actually book the trip themselves, but the agencies issue the ticket. Before doing so, they check to see that the ticket complies with the client or the company’s travel policy.
The agencies also include the information on the various reports that monitor clients’ travel habits.
The process emphasizes agencies’ role as travel managers, overseeing how clients are spending their travel dollars and the patterns in which they buy airline tickets.
With online booking, the agencies continue to charge their customers a service fee, but it often varies according to how many changes are made in each customer’s original booking.
Some agencies say the practice could mushroom. Others are more guarded.
“The implementation and the acceptance of online booking tools varies across the country, company by company,” Anderson said. “It hasn’t been the panacea that its proponents might have hoped it would be, as the adaptation and the acceptance has been slower than expected.”
He said that online booking is one way to book travel, and it’s not meant to be the only one.
“If we have a company that has travelers that want the online booking system, that want to do the simple trips themselves, no problem,” he said. “It’ll do them as complicated as they want.”
–
Agencies Sure of Continued Role
Clients may be examining the air tickets choices and making the initial choice themselves without an agent on the phone or giving it to them, but the agencies are confident of their role within the overall process.
“Our view of how the distribution system’s going to work is that we’re going to be available online and it’ll all be rolled into one set of reports with all the data available and always travel-policy compliant,” Anderson said.
Every company views online booking systems differently, Anderson said.
“Some companies don’t want their staff booking the trips online and would prefer to call one of our travel agents and do it that way, or e-mail,” he said, adding that agencies have a myriad of ways for clients to contact them.
According to Gil Saidy, president and owner of Aer Travel, Inc., offering clients the online booking option comes down to service.
“It just gives customer the feeling that the agency is giving them all their alternatives, because that’s what an agency really has to give every alternative,” Saidy explained. “Whether it’s online or over the phone, the customer’s got to feel like the agency’s earning their money by providing all the options available to them.”
He also said agencies are important in the process.
“Some customers want to book it themselves, but it’s kind of nice to have your agency to say, ‘Hey, you didn’t look at this, you didn’t try this angle,’ ” Saidy said. “Unless it’s just a simple round trip, it gets very confusing for individuals to try to book this stuff on their own. There’s a human element that’s still necessary.”
– Tools Look At Agents Systems and Internet
After the basic booking is made, the information is sent to the agency, which checks the booking to make sure the price is reasonable and issues the ticket.
The information is also added to the agency’s report on the clients’ travel spending.
The most modern programs search travel Web sites such as orbitz.com, while also searching the global distribution systems to which agents have always had access, Andersen said.
The booking tools often have each client’s travel policies programmed in. For instance, customers can only book flights that their company has a discount with because of high travel volume.
The programs can have the client’s or company’s credit card already listed, and the user selects the account he or she will use. The program can also track a route the traveler takes on a regular basis and allow the customer to change the date and submit the booking.
According to Saidy, the agents’ job then becomes looking at the reservation and checking it against other fares.
– Agents Accountable to Find ‘Best Deal’
“The customers can book the trip, but it’s part of the agent’s responsibility to make sure that they got the best deal,” he said. “Don’t just take what they did, actually analyze what they’ve booked, because there are other Web sites out there that could be cheaper. That’s one of the value-added benefits that we give our customers.”
At Balboa Travel, Inc., 10 percent of the company’s air tickets are being booked online, according to Chris “Mac” McKinnie, vice president of corporate sales.
“The reason is that some companies are just unwilling to mandate it,” McKinnie said. Still, he said, “We’ve got a company up north that says ‘You can’t do it any other way.'”
Another client, locally based Qualcomm Inc. doesn’t mandate it, and does about 30 percent of its tickets online.
The use of the booking systems often depends on the customers’ computer literacy, McKinnie said.
“To be honest, right now it almost takes you as long or longer to do an online booking than to call the agency,” he said.
The cost for a company to have its own online booking system varies according to how many users there will be, and how much information and customization the clients want, McKinnie said.
As examples, he said the cost for setting up a small system can be about $3,000, and a larger, more sophisticated system could cost close to $100,000, he said.
McKinnie said his clients who use the online booking programs save money compared to using the agents directly.
“The reason companies do it now is to save on labor,” he said. “If Qualcomm didn’t do any online bookings, the labor that they’d pay would be 30 percent more.”
Balboa has a staff of travel agents at Qualcomm’s offices whom Qualcomm pays for, McKinnie explained. More would be needed if the company didn’t use the booking system.
– Changing The Industry
According to Anderson, online booking tools, although new, are already profitable for his agency.
For the most part, having online booking involves purchasing the software and setting the agency’s systems in place, he said. Also, the company currently has four on-staff programmers to support the programs, he added.
“The implementation is not that complicated, it’s a fairly easy product to use,” Anderson said.
“Like many technologies, they’re always improving. We’ll look back in five years and wonder how we ever got by with what we’re using today,” he said.
