Dell
"Around July 2006 and it was made clear to me that one of my three priorities when I was newly in the role was to launch Cliqbook in UK and Ireland and we went live in the October of 2006. Key drivers were obviously efficiency, cost savings and having control over the policy and compliance with the preferred carrier and hotel programs. "
"It’s mostly really good and we get very little negative feedback and in fact the number of issues coming in to our travel mailbox is just way down and most of the time when there is a problem it’s not down to Cliqbook anyway. Travelers don’t always realize that but we’re always happy to say to them, look, actually the reason you can’t book Ryan Air today is because Ryan Air is down. It’s not Cliqbook, it’s not Travel Fusion, its the supplier that’s got the issue. So most of time the feedback is really good. The challenge was to persuading people who are used to calling the agency to move to online. Where we have new employees, we just tell them you know what, you use Cliqbook to book their travel and they just do it. They don’t have any issue at all. They just use it in the same way as they would any online booking tool for their personal travel so its just converting people who are used to call an agent that’s been the thing you have to overcome."
"We have made huge savings of course in terms of transaction fees but additionally we have been able to show that over our top 20 city pairs without exception the average ticket price bought online is on average 20 percent lower than when booked offline. Travelers just make great choices when they see those fares laid out in front of them so that would be the biggest benefit. All of that puts money back in the travel pots to spend on other tickets. "
"If I was talking to another corporate travel manager who wasn’t currently using an online booking tool I would strongly advise him to think about it immediately. At a time when the cost of travel is just sky rocketing because of fuel prices and decreasing numbers of seats, decreasing inventory it’s really important to get the best value for the dollars that you have available to spend on travel and booking online is in my view the best way to do that."
"Rolling out Cliqbook has enabled me to spend less time on operational issues, day to day travel queries because most of those straightforward bookings go through touchless, quickly and easily with no fuss. It enables me to focus on driving compliance, making sure we use preferred carriers and hotels and car rental companies and saving money basically. More time to do the sourcing piece, less time spent on travel queries."
"Our adoption of the online booking tool in the UK is fantastic. We have 80 percent of the domestic trips booked online. We have around 60 percent of the European trips booked online. Those are the point to point ones. For international travel which is not mandated, mostly because all of our US travel is for sectors but we actually have about 30 percent of international trips booked online as well so it’s really successful. We’re really pleased with it. We’re hoping when we come to the Netherlands and Germany, we’ll be equally successful. We can’t see any reason we wouldn’t be."