Room for Savings: Optimizing Hotel Spend - Carlson

Seven steps to optimize hotel spend > Design an effective hotel policy
Figure 45: Booking through the travel management company provides competitive room
availability and flexibility
* Flexibility: the ability to change or cancel bookings with little or no penalty
Source: CWT Travel Management Institute, based on a hotel price benchmark (330 bookings)
It is important to note that TMCs can obtain
lower rates even at hotels outside a
company’s program. To test this assertion, a
major multinational company asked CWT to
participate in a benchmarking exercise,
comparing rates with the hotel booking specialist
HRS. For this benchmark, the customer chose 10
of the most important hotels used by their
travelers in different cities around the world,
picked three different dates and analyzed rates,
availability and flexibility (i.e., the ability to change
or cancel bookings with little or no penalty). As
shown in Figure 46, the rates proposed by
CWT were on average 5 percent cheaper than
those offered by HRS. In addition, higher scores
were obtained by CWT for hotel availability and
flexibility, as confirmed by CWT research.
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