CONVERGED PROCUREMENT DRIVES NEW Hotel SAVINGS

In July 2023, the Global Business Travel Association and HRS jointly released findings from a survey of travel procurement leaders in Europe and North America. The resulting report – titled “The Power of One: How Breaking up Silos can Drive Value in Converged Hotel Program Management” – offers new findings on the opportunities for corporate programs to enhance transparency, leverage the totality of their hotel segments via convergence, and take ownership of new operational trends. Highlights include:

• Even though travel and meetings teams collaborate, they have work to do to fully realize the benefits of this collaboration. These potential benefits include consolidated data, greater savings, and process efficiencies. Only one in in five travel managers (22%) say their company’s travel and meetings programs are “mostly integrated.”
• Most travel managers (54%) say their company would achieve greater efficiencies/savings if it could conduct RFPs with hotel properties or chains for multiple products/services/segments at the same time. Only 10% say their company would not achieve greater efficiencies/savings by doing so.
• Travel managers point to a number of benefits from negotiating with hotels across multiple segments at the same time. Out of five possible benefits, four are indicated by more than half of respondents. These include consolidated data (70%), greater discounts (66%), process efficiencies (57%), and time saved on RFPs (57%).