Business Travel News CT 100 2008 Resource Guide

BEST PRACTITIONERS Continued from page 14 businesses that we benchmark with all the time. It includes Discovery and CBS and other entertainment areas, not just music. We get together once a quarter, usually in New York City. I have not presented our tool with the scraping capabilities as of yet. There probably are some of them that could use it, because some are very similar to our business model. Chang: Our partners in defense, the Boeings, the Lockheed Martins and Raytheons, have been very generous with us in sharing information. In a sense, we do benchmark with them. Hansen: We don’t do enough of that even in the Association of Corporate Travel Executives. American Express does it on the card side. When we go to New York, it is one of the best forums with all of the consulting people. When it’s just your category, we do help each other. You can talk to the person sitting next to you communication is a key piece. We really do put forth the effort, particularly with the introduction of new technology. The RFP process is not traditionally one that the travelers get involved in. For our GetThere online booking piece, however, we have put together quite a program that includes training, CDs, FAQs, Web site, aids, communicated philosophy. I’ve been through about 20 company acquisitions, which required 86 agencies that we had to bring together into a centralized process. You know, you face a lot of resistance from a lot of new companies who think they have a way of finding a cheaper fare. They go to the Web or a mom-and-pop agency. We spent a considerable amount of time trying to communicate on a face-toface basis why we have the processes we do. It’s all about safety and being able to contact them in an emergency. When they understand where we’re coming from—with regard to their well- about specific things you do. Chang: We are facing the same challenges and the same requirements. Witherspoon: BCD has internal benchmarking against their account managers and their operations managers Hansen: The TMCs all do. Amex has it on the desktop. Lichtenstein: We use American Express Global Advisory Services and Hackett. We use quite a few companies to benchmark. Chang: We use Amex Advisory Services and also Management Alternatives. They conduct some very specific benchmarking surveys for us. BTN: We’ve talked a lot about senior management buy-in, so I would like to talk about, where it’s appropriate, traveler buy-in. For instance, Janice, for you the work is on the front end. You are providing them with the fruits of your best practice. For them, is your best practice seamless, or is there a traveler buy-in aspect? Chang: Certainly anytime we make a change in our program, being rather than issuing an edict—the communication comes across much better. Our goal is to make their traveling experience as convenient as possible. Of course, there’s a cost element that we must consider, especially in these times. Lichtenstein: Our vision is to transform the customer experience, so we never make a change to policy or the program without also adding a change to transform the experience. It is really a hard line to work. That’s why we created the forum. We want to hear from the traveler. They are in all these countries and they have an opportunity to say to us what is working, what isn’t and give their opinions. Every time we made a change in preferred airlines, we said, “We were thinking of these airlines. You live in these countries, what do you think?” There are so many things they can do online now, like booking their activities and making restaurant reservations. There are so many things that they can do now through the travel portal tool that we’ve had GetThere create. Every time we make them change for the company’s benefit, we make a change for them as 22 September 8, 2008 www.BTNonline.com Business Travel News http://www.BTNonline.com

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Business Travel News CT 100 2008 Resource Guide The Corporate Travel 100 Ranking The Corporate Travel 100 Alphabetical Listing Best Practitioners Create Models, Tools

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