When Hubert Joly joined Carlson Wagonlit Travel (CWT) last July as worldwide president and ceo, he boldly set out to the press and the world his objectives.
Fourteen months on, he can justifiably claim that he has gone some way already to fulfilling them. But his presentation of CWT's progress, besides inevitably and understandably extolling Carlson's successes, also contains good news for all TMCs.
CWT has found that business travel in the past 12 months is a rapidly growing market with an annual worldwide spend of up to $350bn predicted by 2007.
CWT said companies are travelling more, despite the flatness of some of the continental economies such as those in France ands Germany.
The reason for this seems to be that UK, French and German companies are taking advantage of the expanding markets in China and India and sending their executives to exploit these openings. So even if business is less buoyant at home, there are still opportunities elsewhere which is to the good of business travel.
Business travel is also a market where hotel spend, as the hotel booking companies have been saying for sometime, now equals that of the traditionally much higher air spend. Again this presents opportunities for the TMCs, as companies, because of the nature of the market, have found comprehensive corporate deals more difficult to come by.
Thanks to new software packages, GDSs are now offering access to a fast growing number of hotels worldwide which also includes MI for hotels outside the major chains.
CWT has seen its hotel sales rise by 21% year on year which suggests they are taking advantage of these new opportunities.
CWT, like American Express, has also seen a remarkable rise in the number of online bookings by its clients, especially in America where in August the figure for the first time topped 50%.
Europe is still lagging somewhat behind with, currently, the adoption of self booking tools still in single figures. (Germany has the highest rate at 10% with countries in southern Europe well below this).
But Europe is on course for 30% by 2007 (when America will be around 60%) which will be an increase of 71%.
On the strength of this Mr Joly said CWT considered itself to be an online company. Perhaps an odd claim as two of the points he made most strongly in his presentation were that CWT, like other TMCS, got far better hotel and air far rates than online companies and that the online agencies (ITAs) while they had made inroads into the leisure market were struggling when it came to the business travel market.
On the first point, Mr Joly said that independent research found that while online agencies got the lowest price 10% of the time, CWT managed it 70% of the time. On average, CWT's hotel rates were 17% lower than those found by online companies and air fare 14% lower. One example he gave was that for the same air route, the fare found by a TMC was $438 and by an online company $558, a difference of 14%.
The fact that ITAs struggle in the business travel management market, at least in Europe, is not new but its confirmation through CWT's experience is no doubt welcome for the traditional TMCs.
Mr Joly said that in France, the European country most penetrated by the ITAs, Carlson had lost only one client to an online agency. In contrast to this, it had won back three of the six clients it had lost to them in 2004.
It's a picture of a world of expanding business travel where companies can get lower prices by using a TMC rather than an online booker and where the corporates still prefer the traditional models to the new ITAs. This may not be a scenario many would have predicted for mid-2005. It may also be too good to last.