CWT makes play to put more hotels into corporate reach

Stanley Slaughter looks at how Carlson Wagonlit Travel’s new hotel booking product CRS by CWT will put more properties within the easy reach of corporates.

Global Distribution Systems (GDSs) were invented and built to take the inventories of airlines. It has long been a bugbear of corporates, TMCs and the GDSs themselves that their hotel content was far below what was needed.

There was more than one reason for this. The hotel market is nowhere near as compact as the aviation industry. The number of airlines in the world is small compared to the vast array and complex ownership of hotels. While the major chains, which do go onto the GDS, have a substantial share of the business travel market, they are just part of it.

There are many thousands of independent properties which are not attached or affiliated to chains and which for various reasons do not put themselves on the GDSs. A major reason for this is that they think the GDSs’ fees are too high for what might be a small property.

A few years back, the number of hotels outside the GDS was estimated at up to 70% but now it is down to around 50% – but this still remains a significant slice of the whole market.

These properties fall within the corporate ambit perhaps because there is nothing else around in a remote part of the world or the corporate has decided it wants to target them to cut costs. But booking them can be a problem. Often the only way to make a reservation was by a phone call or e-mail.

But Carlson Wagonlit Travel, one of the agencies which has pointedly tried to increase the number of hotels it can offer clients, has now come out with a new solution which it thinks can ease the problem.

CRS by CWT was launched in June and Pauline Quéré, Carlson Wagonlit Travel’s VP customer product marketing, said it was the clients who demanded it. There was, she said, a “huge” number of clients showing interest, including global customers, some of whom saw such properties as key targets. “The situation is obvious, even in the EMEAEurope, Middle East and Africa region. There are a lot of hotels which are not on the GDS and our clients were pushing us to give them access to these hotels in an easier way.

“They had been using offline channels or found that the information needed to book was not available. It was very costly and not very efficient. The clients also found that when these hotels were sued there was a lack of compliance to travel policy,” she said.

“So it would help both travel managers and corporates to get a handle on these hotels and also on the company hotel spend.”

Quéré said the aim in finding a solution to this problem was to find a new non-GDS hotel booking solution which would make reservations as seamless as possible. It led CWT to work closely with one of its GDS partners which designed the technology for the new tool.

The TMC believes its new offering will do just this. With the tool, CWT is confident it will increase its current base of around 180,000 hotels. Particular targets, Quéré said, were hotels which might be next to the office of a client and which would be easy to use. It is not so much about pushing volume as of pleasing the client, she said. 

There were two other plus points for CRS by CWT. The agency said it can also enable travellers to book the hotel they need at the same time they book air travel or car rental, as they no longer need to wait for a confirmation or find the non-GDS hotel themselves.

Reservations are also captured in the system allowing travellers to be tracked more accurately and contacted in case of an emergency.

One side effect of this new development is that it is likely to intensify the battle between TMCs and  the specialist hotel booking agencies (HBAs).  “Why not?” said Quéré. “I think we have always been in direct competition.”

If TMCs can sharply increase their hotel offer, it could put pressure on the HBAs. There is also the point that it could make the quiet, behind the scenes co-operation between the two less necessary. In the past, the two “rivals” have been happy to reach agreements for the very reason that HBAs could get properties which were off the TMCs’ map. This may now be less the case. It is a situation industry observers will no doubt watch with interest.

But for the present, Quéré and her colleagues are set on increasing the number of properties they can offer clients, both through the GDS and through CRS by CWT. While accepting they are never going to get 100%, she does expect to see a substantial rise. “The sky is the limit,” she said.