There’s an age-old discussion in the business travel industry about whether it’s best to book hotels via online sites or by going directly to the hotels themselves.
The conversations are (far too) often focused on one aspect: price. Every CFO or Travel Booker knows it’s their duty to the company to get the best price on a room, but they might not understand that price alone isn’t the best indicator of whether a deal is good or not.
Being able to get value for the time spent booking business travel as well as having control over the process are two aspects that are just as integral to a spending strategy. It’s after this understanding that the argument for going to online search aggregators or direct to the hotels gets a third challenger: dedicated business hotel booking platforms like Roomex.
Getting the best price is important to any company. Even though Roomex delivers average savings of 21 percent, price is not the same thing as value.
If your job involves booking hotels, your time is more valuable than marginal price savings. When you decide to search via the various travel-focused sites, identify a shortlist of candidate hotels and contact them directly, it becomes very time-consuming.
Roomex by contrast is easy to use and cuts the time taken to book or cancel a hotel reservation. Because it searches 35 different sources, with access to all hotels worldwide, Roomex finds you the best deals at the most appropriate hotels so that you can satisfy both budgetary requirements and the needs of your ‘customers’, your company’s business travellers.
Our customers typically report that the time taken to make a hotel booking is cut by a factor of ten (e.g. from 20 minutes to two minutes or less). We carried out a survey recently in which our customers said that they valued this time-saving benefit above all else – even more than savings over hotel rate cards.
Roomex is 100 percent transparent with our hotel listings and you can instantly benchmark the rates displayed. In other words, Roomex displays the saving you will make against the hotel’s own best rate. If you have your own negotiated rate with a hotel chain, it is also loaded into the Roomex platform. There is absolutely no ‘pressure selling’ – because we are professionals dealing with professionals, we value long-term relationships not quick sales.
Moreover, your company won’t have to worry about payment in the heat of the moment, as all costs are billed back to Roomex. That means additional time savings, not to mention better administrative efficiency.
Finally, unlike the booking sites focused on the leisure market, Roomex offers professional service to help you along the way. We’re in regular contact with hotels, so while we cannot guarantee an upgrade we can and do guarantee first-class priority support to ensure maximum satisfaction for your business travellers.
Hotel spend for business travel is a budget line that has gone unmanaged and uncontrolled for many years. It has been the case for a number of reasons, but the main one being that with digitalisation it’s seemingly very difficult for procurement officers to squeeze any additional value out of hotels. What is the point of negotiating corporate deals when anyone can go online and get a better deal on hotel booking sites?
Well actually, there is a point. A very big one. In most medium-sized businesses, the cost of travel is the second or third largest controllable expense – and that’s a pretty substantial chunk of change. Once hotel bookings reach a certain critical mass, you want to know where the money is going and you’ll want to put some controls on user behaviour. No company would give all its employees carte blanche to go out and buy or lease their company car, yet their hotel spend over the course of a typical lease period may well amount to more.
Management information and spend data will always be important, especially if you have internal travel policies and even more so if you’re in a sector that has to comply with external regulations or norms. That information will be unavailable to you if employees are doing DIY hotel bookings.
While getting a good price for hotel bookings is important, price is not the same thing as value. But what if you could have both? One option is to outsource the whole business of booking travel to a travel management company (TMC). But why pay someone to do something if you could do it better yourself? Unless you are an exceedingly large buyer of business travel, you may not be a high priority for a TMC.
Roomex was created precisely to combine the benefits of searching for the best deals online with the advantage of superior control over the spend category. In fact, it is rather like having your own TMC in-house, but under your control with no contracts, fees or commissions.
The value here is associated with the visibility Roomex provides. Reporting is achieved through clear and easy-to-understand dashboards on the platform. All information including spend, savings and performance against negotiated rates is stored in live reports which can also be broken down by hotel, division, cost centre and more. Your hotel spend is then consolidated on a single invoice that gives you between 30 and 60 days’ free credit, eases payment and eliminates credit card risk.
An additional consideration is the safety and well-being of your business travellers. No doubt they sometimes say to procurement, ‘I can get a better deal myself’. What happens though if things go wrong?
For example, they turn up thinking they’ve booked a room, but it turns out the hotel never received a confirmation? Who is responsible? Who picks up the extra cost when the hotel manager says the room is gone but they can offer another one at twice the price?
With Roomex, that simply doesn’t happen. The booking process is automated, and in the unlikely event of something going wrong, we have a support team working to assist you.
When it comes to booking business travel, price is always first in mind. Sometimes though, it pays to think about more than margins and how that can impact the company’s bottom-line.