Hotel reshopping and analytics company Tripbam has enhanced
its Smart Sourcing tool and has made it available as a standalone service, the
company told BTN.
The product, unveiled last fall, uses Tripbam's hotel
intelligence tool to find locations where there is opportunity for savings with
sourced hotels, according to the company. Smart Sourcing implementation
requires corporations or consultants provide 12 months of booking data in any
format and the client's current hotel programme. Tripbam then identifies
high-performing hotel candidates and calculates target rates based on the
company’s room nights, volume and historical hotel behaviours. Travel managers
can select a dynamic or a static rate, avoid blackout dates and room category
restrictions and request amenities. The predefined bid with an
"accept" or "reject" option is sent directly to the hotels
via email using Tripbam’s list of hotel contacts. Negotiations occasionally
ensue, according to Tripbam. If a bid is accepted, rates are automatically
loaded, and Tripbam immediately begins to audit and track hotel performance.
After a 2019 pilot of the tool, about 74 per cent of travel
managers' bids were accepted by hotels, a figure that varies by company and
market, said Tripbam founder and CEO Steve Reynolds.
Previously, Smart Sourcing was available only to existing
Tripbam clients or travel management companies that used its rate auditing
service. Reynolds said the company decided to offer it as a standalone product
after requests by consultants, which increased after Tripbam launched a
consultant certification programme in June.
"The [consultants] started talking about the service to
their clients, and some were not Tripbam customers," Reynolds said.
"Clients were like, 'Great, let's do it, but I can't wait until I get a
contract signed… We need to get this going now.' If the client was not going to
be on the whole integration with the agency, we needed an alternative way to
get the data into the system so we could do some sourcing. That led us to this
solution. It's really opened up the market a lot. There were agencies that
really wouldn't allow clients to use our service. Now the client doesn't need
agency approval, they just send us their [historical] data."
Traditionally, Tripbam prices its services based on hotel
bookings, but because there aren't many for business travel at the moment due
to the Covid-19 pandemic, pricing for Smart Sourcing is based on the size of the
user's hotel programme with a monthly fee per included hotel, Reynolds said.
Product enhancements
Among Smart Sourcing product enhancements is a batch request-for-proposals
feature that allows users to bulk upload hotel targets, even thousands, instead
of one at a time. There's no limit to the number of bids that can go out at
once, Reynolds said. The feature can also convert existing static hotel rate
agreements to new static or dynamic agreements to account for ongoing market
volatility.
Also in light of that volatility, the company has created a
new method of determining discount recommendations to reflect current market
conditions.
"If we were using just historical data, the current
discount you would have gotten in the past is not the discount you are getting
today," Reynolds said. "Before, you were getting a 25 per cent
discount. If you look at the average daily rate for bookings as of this month,
your actual discount is minus 5 per cent. The [best available rate] is lower
than your static rate. The problem is, I don't have bookings for today for this
client at this hotel. What am I going to benchmark it on? What we've done is,
we know in this market the ADR has dropped, so I'm not going to use the ADR
from the past. I'm going to discount it by what that market has dropped to and
come up with a new benchmark."
One differentiator between using Smart Sourcing as a
standalone tool instead of coupled with Tripbam's reshopping service, beyond
the lack of reshopping benefits, is that it is more difficult for the company
to grade hotel performance, so other benchmarks are used.
"It comes down to [last room availability] and rate
availability," Reynolds said. "I'm just not as aware real-time as to
what are the available rates. You want to be more proactive and look at deals
in the future, and we can't really provide that with this new model. Everything
else is pretty much the same. We can measure hotel performance, the effective
discounting, and we can measure your rates to benchmarks. We just can't measure
LRA performance as well as we normally do."
One potential hurdle for Smart Sourcing users is the
widespread hotel layoffs and furloughs related to the Covid-19 pandemic, which
could complicate identification of the appropriate hotel contacts to receive
bid emails. "We consolidated contacts for each individual hotel across the
200,000 in our system, from a variety of sources," Reynolds said. "We
pinged those addresses to see if they were valid. For those that weren't, we
hired task rabbits to find out who is the right contact for that hotel. We
finally got through the entire database and, as of today, we probably have the
best contact list of anyone on the planet."