French travel agents are losing multi-national clients because of problems over the use of self booking tools (SBTs), Philippe Quillien of Selectour Voyages, said.
Mr Quillien, in charge of major accounts for the Paris-based agency, said that in France trains accounted for 40% of bookings but there were difficulties using SBTs for these reservations.
He told 150 delegates at the Radius Annual Global Shareholders' Meeting in Shanghai such online bookings needed a special and expensive licence.
There were also problems using SBTs for different types of fares, notably the special fares on the SNCF, the French rail network, and the discounted fares on domestic flights with Air France.
"So we have SBTs in place but we can only use them for part of our business. It is improving because there is pressure from the clients, especially global ones." Mr Quillien said.
Afterwards Mr Quillien told BTE that the booking engines were now being upgraded but still there was a fee to pay for new licences for the upgraded product.
He said the problem also affected bookings on Eurostar where some clients had a large volume of bookings.
"I don't think this is a rare problem in France because the use of trains is so large. The SBT situation in France is improving but we are not yet getting to a final resolution," he said.
50% of UK hotel budget wasted - BSI
A new survey by hotel booking agency BSI has found that nearly 50% of hotel spending in the UK is "wasted."
BSI's poll of nearly 200 companies found that 20% had no policy to govern their spend, half the bookings did not guarantee the best rate and fewer than 25% knew how much they spent on hotels each year.
Many of those questioned were travel and procurement managers and company ceos.
Mr Charles Cockell, BSI's managing director, said: “We've noticed many cultural changes in the trends of hotel bookers, and this piece of research confirms just what we suspected - many are not managing hotel expenditure effectively.
"Airlines have been under scrutiny for many years, with huge cost savings made on air travel as a result, however, as annual hotel expenditure can often exceed that of air travel, it makes sense to now shift the focus."