Conferma

Conferma releases results of Customer Survey

2012-01-23T16:59:00.002Z

Conferma haspublished the results of its recent customer survey.

The surveywas distributed via email to all travel agents on Conferma’s emergency contactlist. The survey was completed by 70 customers.

Following theprevious customer survey conducted in March 2011, Conferma set out to gaugecustomer perception with the performance of the Support service and the onlinebooking tool, Hotel Booker.

Customerperception of Conferma Support was extremely positive, with satisfactionratings exceeding 95% for availability, resolutions and knowledge. Thiscompared favourably with results from the previous survey, with the number ofnegative responses reduced in each category. In the remaining category, 94% ofrespondents indicated that the response time of Support either met or exceededexpectations. Indeed, Support was widely praised, with several positivecomments, such as: “Always available when help is needed” and “Always have aquick reply.”

As ever, theaim of a customer survey is to identify any areas for improvement. Negativeresponses for availability could be attributed to customers contacting Confermaoutside of office hours. Conferma is currently dedicated to providing a supportservice to handle and enquiries from Monday to Friday 8.30am – 6.00pm,excluding public holidays. Service Management are currently investigating thepossibility of extending Support’s hours of availability.

Some commentssuggested that the communication of resolutions could be improved. ServiceManagement is contemplating implementing a more sophisticated method ofrecording all internal communications to ensure that communication betweenSupport and Development is monitored regularly and thoroughly.

Finally, somerespondents indicated that they had never contacted Conferma Support or wereunaware of the email address. Contact details are prominently displayed on www.conferma.com and are present on allpromotional literature. However, to raise further awareness, Conferma iscurrently making a concerted effort to disseminate contact details for Supportas widely as possible. Conferma Support can be contacted by email at support@conferma.com or by telephone on+44 (0)844 815 3601.

The resultsof the survey also reflected extremely favourably upon Hotel Booker. Thelayout, user-experience and responsiveness were widely lauded, achieving 100%satisfaction ratings, whilst customer satisfaction with the ease of use andreliability exceeded 96%. Praise for Hotel Booker’s layout and user experiencewas particularly welcome, as it justified the measures taken by the DevelopmentTeam to improve the booking tool’s performance over the previous 12 months.Positive comments included: “I think Hotel Booker is an excellent tool, veryeasy to use and straightforward.”

The 100%satisfaction rating for responsiveness was also particularly pleasing asDevelopment has invested significant time and resources implementing the latest.net technology and introduced considerable performance enhancing software,ensuring the infrastructure supporting the v4.3 solution is the best availablein the industry. Investment in innovation and the latest technology reflectConferma’s commitment to provide leading solutions for our technology. Thissuperb feedback unequivocally indicates that this investment was completelyjustified.

With regardto respondents’ suggested improvements, nearly half of all suggestions calledfor more search criteria in Hotel Booker. Conferma is looking into incorporatingsearches according to hotel facilities, landmarks and GDS reference codes intofuture releases of Hotel Booker. However, these data issues would requiresignificant development and would therefore not be available until the latterhalf of 2012 at the very earliest.

Othersuggestions pertained to group bookings, payment restrictions and improvingAgency Admin functionality. Conferma aims to introduce some of these changesfor the next release of Hotel Booker (v4.4) in mid-February.

The finalquestion of the survey concerned alternative Self-Booking Tools and returnedextremely positive feedback for Conferma, with 30% of respondents revealingthat they use Hotel Booker exclusively.

Conferma’snext Customer Satisfaction Survey is scheduled for June 2012. Watch this spacefor further development!

2012: A big year for UK hotels

2012-01-19T15:12:00.001Z

On behalf ofeveryone at Conferma, I would like to begin this blog entry by wishing all ourcustomers and partners a very happy, healthy and prosperous New Year.

As Conferma’sbooking volumes increase around the world, 2012 will present particular issues,challenges and opportunities for the T&E sector in the UK. With the adventof London 2012 and Her Majesty’s Diamond Jubilee, London is preparing towelcome athletes, visitors, media, sponsors and dignitaries from across theglobe. Therefore, as global focus centres not only on the capital, but alsoother British cities and regions, 2012 will have considerable implications forthe T&E sector.

Given thesignificance, interest and prestige surrounding London 2012 and the Jubileecelebrations, the temptation for TMCs will be to centre their focus on thecapital. However with events for both landmark occasions being staged in venuesacross the country, TMCs will also need to reinforce their coverage inalternate locations. Olympic event hosts outside the capital include Windsor,Weymouth, Portland, Broxbourne, Benfleet, Wembley, Glasgow, Cardiff, Manchesterand Newcastle. Moreover, flagship annual events on the British calendar, includingthe Edinburgh Festival, the British Grand Prix, the Open Championship and theWorld Travel Market will ensure that the T&E sector cannot afford to takeits eye off business as usual amidst the furore of the Games and the Jubilee.

Furthermore,the anticipated influx of international officials and tourists will inevitablyresult in increased hotel prices. Indeed, rates currently stand at 30% higherthan average for June and July. TMCs will be required to demonstrate thecapability to process more and larger transactions than ever before. Largevisitor numbers and the mayhem that will inevitably ensue, particularly inLondon, also mean that the importance of forward bookings and planning aheadcannot be overemphasised. This ability to manage large volumes of bookings andtransactions will provide agencies the opportunity to demonstrate their valueto large corporate companies and become the TMC of choice. Indeed, hoteliersare likely to give priority availability to TMCs with lucrative corporateclients with the highest levels of expenditure, ancillary spend and bookingsfor meeting space.

This is whereTMCs can rely on Conferma’s platform of payment solutions to streamline theirbusiness operations. The Conferma Settlement Platform (CSP) offers TMCs an automatedsolution for the settlement and reconciliation of travel expense that removesmanual intervention, reduces processing costs and is PCI-DSS compliant.

Despite highdemand for hotel accommodation, hoteliers must guard against hiking theirprices too much, so as to avoid the scenarios experienced in Athens (2004) andVancouver (2010), when extortionate prices deterred visitors and resulted inlate availability and unsold rooms. Hotels must also be mindful not to neglectservice levels for their all year round business, whilst increasing expenditureto satisfy their increase in new international guests. London hotels inparticular still need to cater for demand for annual events such as RoyalAscot, Wimbledon, The Proms, Henley and the Farnborough Airshow, as well as theParalympic Games in September.

With regardto forward planning, TMCs must strike a fine balance when advising theirclients. Advocating early bookings secures availability but at high rates withprohibitive booking conditions. On the other hand, later bookings leave clientsvulnerable to a lack of availability, but payment does not have to be mademonths in advance of the Games. Alternatively, any business-critical staff mayneed to be accommodated outside of London, for example in Saint Albans, Watfordand Reading, due to the impracticalities of commuting or being based in Londonduring the Games.

As hotelavailability becomes increasingly sparse, TMCs and corporates alike will haveto look harder than usual to locate accommodation throughout the UK during theGames. This search could be made easier by Conferma’s online Self Booking Tool.Hotel Booker offers an inventory of more than 150,000 properties, includingdirect connections to budget hotel chains Travelodge and Premier Inn, who haveboth increased their presence in the capital ahead of the Olympics.

Moreover, asprices increase, merely locating accommodation will, in most cases, notsuffice. Thanks to Rate Analyser, Conferma’s intelligent hotel price comparisontool, TMCs will be able to offer clients the best value rates available. RateAnalyser also provides TMCs with rate trend data for all hotel bookings andnotifies users of any favourable rate changes, allowing time to rebook ifappropriate. This could become an increasingly attractive proposition if pricesdrop to reflect last minute availability in the build-up to London 2012.

2012 holdsmany challenges in store for the T&E sector. Yet many opportunities alsolie in prospect. I would like to conclude this blog by expressing Conferma’scommitment to overcoming these challenges and seizing these opportunities incollaboration with our existing partners, whilst expanding our portfolio towork with new partners.

Reducing Credit Risk

2011-12-06T13:55:00.001Z

The eurozone debt crisis. Global recession. Bailout funds. Public sector strikes. Rarely has the economic outlook been so bleak.

Amid the backdrop of a challenging economic and geopolitical environment and the relapse into a second successive recession in as many years, businesses worldwide are becoming increasingly vulnerable to the dangers of credit risk.

Furthermore, with the festive period imminent and the accompanying lull in business, it is inevitable that numerous companies will experience short-term cash flow problems. As a result, payments to suppliers are delayed, who in turn suffer from credit exposure and take longer to pay their own bills. This creates a domino effect that cascades its way throughout supplier and customer networks.

The business travel sector is no different. In fact, credit risk becomes an even greater problem because of the fine margins to which many in the industry work. As recently as last week, Thomas Cook, one of the most iconic British brands in the travel sector, secured a £200m loan to enable it to survive the winter lull in business.

TMCs. OTAs. Hotels. Everyone is vulnerable to credit risk. For instance, hotels typically have to wait 30-60 days to receive payments in traditional billback agreements. Depending on their business model, payments to suppliers are then synchronised accordingly. However, a single default on payments in the supply chain affects everyone.

Therefore, in such challenging economic times, companies that become synonymous with prompt payments become increasingly attractive to do business with. This is where Conferma’s products, based on virtual card technology, offer many benefits for banks, corporates and the business travel community. With the Conferma Settlement Platform (CSP), TMCs can hold the credit on a virtual card account or, better still, have their corporate customers open a virtual card account, thus removing their own credit exposure. Conferma’s automated settlement and reconciliation solutions not only significantly reduce the risk of fraud, but also guarantee immediate payment to the supplier in order to remove any credit exposure.

For TMCs, assigning the credit risk to the corporate customer also opens up further opportunities for your business. Perhaps most importantly, if a client does experience problems, you will only be exposed to the loss of the transaction fee, as opposed to the full amount of the booking. However, you could also charge your transaction fee to the virtual card, ensuring that you receive payments quicker.

As an independent third-party settlement solution, Conferma represents the best option because it currently partners with some of the world’s largest banks. Furthermore, with an extensive network of content providers at our disposal, the Conferma Platform provides a single point of connection to the banking world and the travel community.

In the current economic climate, the Conferma Platform not only guarantees punctual payments to ensure customer satisfaction, but does so securely, efficiently and with reduced processing costs, allowing your business to weather the stormy winter period ahead.

Content is King

2011-11-24T11:01:00.001Z

Over the past few years we've seen a huge rise in the meta search engines, such as Kayak, SkyScanner, Farecast (now part of Microsoft Bing). These meta search engines crawl the web on your behalf to understand, read and record the information that varied online travel agencies (OTA) are publishing. These services give users the ability to enter search requests and in response receive an abundance of pricing from across the web. In seconds offers from ebookers, Expedia, Opodo and many more are returned. Users simply select the deal that's appealing, click a link and they are instantly transported to the OTA for payment.

Like meta search engines, the business travel community want a single view of inventory at a hotel, across all major booking channels to view the best deal and then book it. For all the power Hoteliers are given for yield and channel management, consumers are trying their best to beat the system for the lowest rate, wherever it is.

In business travel the biggest prize was how many hotels you had in your database, then how many can be booked online and finally how many of those are duplicates... No longer is the case. Content within business travel is about the quality of the product the OTA, GDS, Merchant or Direct Connect is providing. Questions are raised on; how long does it take to book, payment terms, commission, how much back-end resource is required, what key locations are covered for specific suppliers.

Over the past couple of years we have seen growth in the request for consumer OTAs to be included within the Conferma Booking Platform. Many OTAs offer affiliate schemes for agencies to join, with a major benefit of receiving commission from one supplier, the OTA, not through chasing each hotel.

The Conferma Booking Platform connects to all major GDS, multiple Direct Connects, OTAs and Merchants plus support for Offline and Allocation content. Agencies have the power to pick and choose what content they would like made available and hold their own agreements with the Content Providers. The Conferma Booking Platform is built on an architecture that allows us to easily add new content without having to make a single code change to our booking tool (in the majority of cases new providers can be implemented in six weeks).

Trends in the consumer travel sector steer the future of business travel, and at Conferma we’re positioned to react quickly.

Ps. 160'000 unique hotels (130'000 online (and no duplicates))

The importance of choice

2011-11-21T12:03:00.001Z

The recent news that International Airlines Group (IAG) are in negotiations with Lufthansa to acquire British Midland (BMI) has raised concerns in the aviation community. The acquisition of BMI would see IAG, who already own British Airways and Iberia, increase its share of landing slots at Heathrow, the UK’s busiest airport, rise from 45% to 54%.

The Leicestershire based carrier has reported losses of 154m euros (£133m; $213) for the first nine months of 2011, citing rising fuel costs and social unrest in some of its destinations in North Africa and the Middle East as reasons.

Amid growing concerns that IAG are monopolising Heathrow, Virgin Atlantic, who have tabled a rival bid to acquire the loss-making carrier, have described the prospect of an IAG takeover as "disastrous for consumer choice and competition".

Consumer choice is one of the fundamental aspects that Conferma, expert providers of settlement and reconciliation solutions to the Travel and Expenses (T&E) sector, values greatly. Providing access to multiple GDS and non-GDS content providers, Conferma prides itself on its vast and varied suite of content. Our award-winning Conferma Settlement Platform (CSP) can be seamlessly integrated into all systems, therefore we can partner with any card issuing bank or payments provider.

Conferma, who itself has recently expanded its own portfolio to offer payment solutions for low-cost carriers, is proud of its independence. Furthermore, Conferma’s neutrality endears it to an extensive network of travel and banking partners. This neutrality allows Conferma to maximise the number of potential opportunities in the business travel market and encourages competition amongst its partners.

Only time will tell if IAG's acquisition of BMI will deprive Heathrow of healthy competition and consumer choice.

Building A Platform For Commerce

2011-10-25T12:13:00.001+01:00

In the early days of CSP, CSP stood for the Conferma Settlement Plan and our customers had only one card partner and one booking tool (ours) to access. Of course, this was only ever going to be beneficial for some customers and so we took a step change in the way we developed CSP. We began to build version 2, the Conferma Settlement Platform. A Platform that would facilitate the same founding features of CSP but on an open network for any booking or desktop tool to connect to any card issuer they want.

The effort the team has put into the platform over the past few years is demonstrating how our open network is coming together. CSP is being used to pay for more travel via more booking channels, where customers are based in more countries with an ever expanding supplier base.

Today, with an ever expanding CSP network you can;

Use a booking or desktop tool of your choice (XML integration)
Use Hotel Booker with over 12 content providers
Use Conferma Low cost air tool
Use Conferma WebPay to place cards into any website or desktop system
Use our Batch Interface for bulk card deployments
Seamlessly access (and switch between) cards from all of our major card issuing banks
Settlement is being performed in multiple currencies
Access powerful data hands offs for your system

At the start of the month we implemented our latest card partner, HSBC. The speed and professionalism of the implementation into a major partner, such as HSBC, shows the strength and capability of the team here at Conferma.

The choice of booking tool and card issuer is up to you, as it should be. Like never before we’re making it easier to be part of the network. Contact us for more information.

New Office

2011-09-22T16:17:00.007+01:00

You may have noticed a lack of blog posts in the past couple of months, all I can say is it has been very busy here at Conferma! In the coming weeks we have a number of exciting announcements to make which will give you some insight into what we have been up to.

That said, I would like to announce we have successfully moved office! Whilst our previous offices were certainly different from the normal financial services HQ, we had simply grown too big for them. We have now moved into our very own bright building at Cheadle Royal Business Park, which has plenty of space for growth.

Overall the move was stress free with just a few technical hiccups with internet access from our offices and a rather frustrating incoming call issue, let’s just say you had to get your point made in ten minutes...

The move is a step change for Conferma, with a more corporate feel, but we have kept the fun and quirky environment we are known for. A big hit with the staff is the new break area where the full walls are white boards.

The new offices are a recognition to the staff, customers and partners that together we're doing something right. The new offices mark a point in Conferma's history and the continuation of an exciting journey that I hope you will all join us on.

Conferma WebPay: The New Way to Pay

2011-07-06T08:20:00.002+01:00

In the corporate world, there is an opportunity to automate low to mid value, high volume transactions with new payment technologies. These traditional transactions represent what is called the ‘middle-ground’ of purchasing and they take a disproportionate amount of resources to process.

Research by *RPMG found the cost of processing paper-based purchase orders averaged $93 (US). However, making the same transaction with a single-use purchasing account cost $22. Further analysis revealed that purchasing cards can:
· reduce typical procurement cycles by approximately 12 days;
· reduce the number of suppliers managed by an average of 16%; and
· result in a reduction or redeployment of staff.
With these results, it is easy to see how new payment technologies are gaining traction in the corporate world.

Conferma’s new payment technology, ‘WebPay’, automates the procure-to-pay process delivering real-time efficiencies to both procurement and accounts payable departments. This solution uses web based technology to introduce single-use credit cards into the purchasing process and capture enhanced levels of data.

Unlike other payment solutions, WebPay is connected to Conferma’s network of financial partners giving its users a choice of card provider. This allows Conferma’s customers to select the best payment partner. With WebPay companies can retain cash longer, pay suppliers earlier, reduce man-power costs, drive compliance and cover new spend categories.

WebPay can purchase anything online from paper to corporate travel all via one platform. Once the system is deployed, it can quickly be extended out into many purchasing categories. This allows companies to centralise their procurement. Many companies are now realising the power of having one platform, one investment, capable of managing this middle-ground of payment. WebPay can use any web-browser to access any website and complete a transaction.

WebPay can standardise reporting data from a multitude of transactions by using the same accounts to purchase a variety of products. Therefore, the data reported back via WebPay is consistent and accurate. This standardised data can be handed-off into other ERP systems to create a powerful management tool capable of tracking payments.

Conferma’s WebPay has a global capability and can be used to purchase goods and services online anywhere in the world. This gives corporate managers the ability to globally synchronise purchasing practises.

This new solution levers all of Conferma’s expertise in the corporate payment sector into a single powerful platform.

*RPMG - 2010 Purchasing Card Benchmark Survey Results - http://www.rpmgresearch.net/.

Conferma: The virtual world of Conferma

2011-05-24T12:41:00.004+01:00

It seems that every day a new technology appears on the horizon with new functions and capabilities. The ever excited media is all too keen to report that this new technology is going to revolutionise the way we live.

Since the birth of the internet business has recognised its potential to create new markets and generate money. But, many early attempts at creating online businesses were restricted as the internet and its associated technologies were simply to slow – regardless of the potential. This led to the dot-com bubble as investors invested in projects that the technology couldn’t deliver.

Perhaps the most notable example of this was Boo.com an online fashion retailer in the early-mid nineties. They stretched the technology too far and their resultant collapse was symptomatic of the dot-com bubble - plenty of potential but not enough technology. However, as the internet developed and its capability improved the world became ever more reliant on this new virtual world.

Yet the emergence of one new piece of payment technology has gone largely unnoticed, virtual credit cards. Virtual credit cards operate in the same way as a normal card with the exception that no physical card is produced; they are issued dynamically for single purchasing events and are inherently secure.

In the virtual world the virtual card is coming to the fore. Enabling transactions and helping to realise the potential that so many saw in those early dot-com start-ups. They are easier to use and manage whilst offering increased flexibility and peace of mind. Essentially, virtual cards unlock revenue and create the flows of money many predicted.

Conferma has worked hard to build a network of financial partners capable of delivering virtual cards into the purchasing of corporate travel and expense (T&E). This growing network is; creating new efficiencies in existing purchasing processes, winning new business and creating new markets. Furthermore, Conferma’s settlement and reconciliation technology is superseding the traditional T&E billback process.

Conferma call this solution CSP (Conferma Settlement Platform) and it is rapidly gaining recognition within the world of corporate T&E.

Conferma and others within the payments industry have long recognised the potential of virtual cards. Conferma are using this technology to create new web-pay solutions that extend beyond corporate T&E into other B2B related purchasing categories. Anywhere, where there are; high-volume, mid-value transactions Conferma’s virtual cards can be deployed. Using Conferma’s technology does much more than traditional paper-based purchasing processes. It allows for data to be captured, processed and transmitted in a way that was not previously possible.

Ultimately, Conferma’s virtual credit card technology will give freedom of choice and transaction security in the virtual world.

Conferma: The I.T. Jungle

2011-05-04T16:10:00.001+01:00

Recent high profile cyber attacks and security breaches for companies such as Sony have again brought the issue of PCI compliance into sharp focus. The attack on Sony proves that even the most I.T. savvy company can fall victim to a cyber attack.

For many industry commentators, Sony merely represents a growing list of companies who are victims of the I.T. jungle. Criminal gangs, terrorist organisations and hackers stalk companies looking for the slightest gap in security, a blind-spot, an open door or simple negligence. To then hack and steal personal and credit card data from unwary and ill-prepared companies.

When we consider the business travel industry we can see that the risks are high, how many TMCs photocopy and fax card data around the world to hotels, exhibition centres and alike? Relying on the honesty of their staff and the person receiving the fax for security! Or even worse store card data within their own systems.

Many TMCs and HBAs within the industry struggle to get to grips with PCI compliance and its implications. How much will it cost to implement? What do I need to do? Where do we begin? Achieving conformance is not simple and takes time to get right and maintain. So for small, medium and even large companies meeting the required standards can be problematic and expensive.

Basically, PCI standards have twelve points of compliance categorised into six groups. This sounds simple enough but there are roughly two hundred and fifty controls to be put in place, depending on the level of security you require. And the level of protection required is determined by the number of credit card transactions processed each year. Each of the two hundred and fifty controls can be verified in up to four times and may require up to four pieces of evidence to prove you meet PCI standards.

The costs of PCI accreditation for even a small TMC or HBA can run into thousands of pounds and for a large multi-national corporation it can be hundreds of thousands of pounds. However, doing nothing is not an option as MasterCard and Visa will fine breached companies for non-compliance. These fines reflect the scale and number of breaches and the size of the company. This ensures that conforming is the cheaper option.

In 2009 MasterCard* published their fines for non-compliance and these are steep. Fines can reach two hundred thousand dollars (US) for failing to meet the required standards with a charge of between ninety and three hundred dollars** per credit card record stolen. This doesn’t include the resultant legal action from your customers and damage to your company’s reputation. Put simply, for many companies within the industry, this is an issue of comply or die.

So with the costs of complying and the time it takes clearly overshadowed by the expense of a security breach where do you go for help. The answer is Conferma.

Conferma reduce the scope of your compliance requirements by taking the need to hold, process and transmit card data out of your company but not your control. In the modern I.T. jungle Conferma is the game keeper providing expertise and protection whilst saving both time and money.

*MasterCard
** Basics for PCI compliance

Conferma: Innovation in the world of corporate T&E

2011-04-19T15:51:00.002+01:00

Within the Corporate T&E world there is an opinion, amongst some, that the industry lags behind other sectors in adopting and embracing new technologies and solutions. This could be, in part, due to the ageing and inflexible legacy systems that pervade amongst many operators that constrict their organisation.

Additionally, there are other challenges of finding and keeping staff capable of deploying and managing cutting-edge technology and the rising associated costs. Finally, where and how do you find an innovative and reliable technology partner? These are a few of the common problems that make IT such a difficult issue to address.

Put simply, the industry has a love hate relationship with IT. Yes we need it to do the complex data handling and moving but no we don’t want the ageing legacy systems and incompatible platforms.

Fundamentally, there is no silver bullet, no all encompassing ubiquitous system passing data between and from all Hotels, Airlines, Conference Halls, Rail, Car Hire and Taxi companies back to the booking agent and corporate. Similarly, the banks and technology partners all deploy their own solutions designed from their viewpoint.

So it is no wonder that any company investing in the next generation technology would take a good hard look at the market place before investing. After all, two years from now you don’t want to be tied to another legacy system incapable of meeting the challenges of the future.

One alternative is the Conferma Network! One partner pre-connected to numerous financial and technical partners via a single platform. Conferma’s agnostic approach to partnering with financial and technical partners allows our customers to seamlessly integrate our booking, and settlement platforms into their solutions.

Conferma’s unique and intelligent solutions provide both commercial and technical innovation in that all parties can benefit from using our intelligent solutions to supersede the traditional billback process whilst having the freedom to choose or stay with their existing technical and financial partners. Customers of the Conferma network have access to a powerful Hotel Booking system connected to 150,000 hotels and an array of technical and financial partners for the corporate T&E market.

The real value of the Conferma network is that it will change, grow and develop over the coming years’ in line with the industry. As new booking technologies appear, Conferma will embrace them; and as new partners appear, Conferma will join with them. I think you get the idea. We change, we adapt, we do the hard work - and you benefit.

We are listening to our customers

2011-04-05T16:19:00.002+01:00

Last month Conferma completed the first of many Customer Surveys. The first segment of our customer base we listened to were frontline staff in the corporate hotel booking world. This short survey asked these corporate hotel bookers to rate our customer service and the booking website.

Once the results had been collated our technical team sat down to discuss the data and identify any opportunities to improve the service and solutions we offer. It was surprising that such a brief survey could generate so much information and ideas.

We were pleased with the results regarding customer service satisfaction – many respondents were either ‘Very Satisfied’ or ‘Satisfied’ with the service they received. 83.1% of respondents were either ‘Satisfied’ or ‘Very Satisfied’ with the availability of our customer support. The general feeling is that our customer support is performing well. However, we have spotted opportunities to do better.

To enhance our service further we are introducing bi-annual full-service reviews at an agency level. A new management feature will be built into the site to allow clients to nominate and manage their own contact list. Additionally, all customers will be informed of our support escalation process.

These are just a few of the customer support enhancements we hope will give our customers the support they deserve.

Conferma has achieved 100% availability during the last six months and we believe this justifies our investment in the latest hardware and software. In June last summer we launched v4 of our hotel booking solution, this .NET version is faster and more reliable than its predecessor v3.

When asked how responsive they thought our booking site was nearly half of all respondents thought it was ‘Responsive’ and 96.8% rated the site as either ‘Very Responsive, ‘Responsive’, or ‘OK’. Many within the technical team believe that Conferma can better this score and will work hard over the coming months to make the booking website more responsive.

One pleasing conclusion was that many of the improvements suggested for the website are already in our development pipeline.

Upcoming developments for the site include enhancing the search function, removing guide rates, improving data quality and enhancing administrator functionality. We are also considering introducing GDS property locator codes to help experienced staff quickly search the system.

We have more improvements in the development pipeline and will issue these to our customers over the coming months.

The Jevons Effect!

2011-03-16T11:39:00.001Z

At Conferma we are always eulogising about the efficiencies and benefits our systems deliver to the corporate T&E industry. Improve your operations, use superior processes, reduce costs, reduce man hours, eliminate paper based processes and overcome the nightmare that is billback! These are just some of the benefits we tell the industry and anyone else who will listen to us.

What are the implications of these benefits you ask? Will we need fewer staff, can we process more customers, win new business? The answer is simple, about two hundred years ago a leading economist named William Jevons observed that increasing the efficiency with which a resource is used increases the rate of consumption.

In other words as your staff (human resources) adopt Conferma’s solutions they will suddenly be able to achieve more today than they could yesterday. Ultimately, the capacity of your team will increase as workflows are improved.

So where is this all going? The answer is simple, despite all our eulogies, many within the industry are still struggling to make efficiencies in the workplace, especially when it comes to hotel billback. Time after time I read numerous articles and blogs full of people wishing for an alternative to billback. Haven’t they heard? Didn’t they listen? Conferma overcame the problem of billback years ago. Probably about the same time, William Jevons was writing his notes up...

Taking billback as an example, this process is notoriously time-consuming as bookings and invoices have to be matched manually. In many cases, data is incomplete, delayed in arrival and can expose clients to a credit risk. Put simply the challenge is to match invoices with back office data.

Conferma have designed a solution that overcomes this problem using virtual card technology to gather and match booking and billing data and then pass this reconciled data to the correct parties involved.

This gathering and matching of data means frontline staff do not have to print off numerous documents or repeatedly enter the same data to make a booking. It is all done for them by Conferma powered technology. Additionally the automated reconciliation of data removes the tedious process of chasing up outstanding invoices.

Now you have learnt a little bit more, why not contact Conferma to see what we can do for you.

Data, data, everywhere, but not a report to run...

2011-02-14T13:05:00.002Z

In a world where organisations seek end to end travel and expense solutions, often using multiple suppliers the missing link is usually the detailed payment information. In response, Visa and MasterCard introduced a solution, which allows merchants to submit additional data to the card issuers regarding a specific transaction (P Card). This additional data may include; tax amounts, product codes, descriptions, shipping information, etc - this is called; Level 3 data. The banks display this information on customer's statements. This provides an enhanced level of service from both merchants and banks enabling the end customer to account for their purchases automatically, potentially right through to the corporate ERP system.

So why do you still only receive basic statements (transaction date, merchant narrative and the charge amount), you ask? Well it seems whilst transaction fees from the banks/issuers are lower to merchants if Level 3 data is provided. The implementation process is both expensive and complex for small-mid size merchants and even larger ones don't hand off this data for "strategic" reasons.

Historically airlines do provide Level 3 data; the lower transaction fee is very enticing due to their volume. The data made available by airlines includes the traveller name, ticket number and route information. After looking at a number of examples of airline data we discovered some airlines are very consistent in the data they provide. However, some airlines provide a poorer level of data for instance Route information from some airlines were "XXX-XXX", rather than "MAN-JFK". This complicates the situation even more.

This lack of transaction level data received from their suppliers frustrates Business customers. To compound this Merchants tend to provide the data via email or post, which arrives in different formats and on a timescale that suits the merchant. Manual intervention is then required by the customer to reconcile all this non matched data to monthly bank statements.

An implementation barrier exists for banks and issuers which hinders the success of Level 3 data - the inability to push this as a solution. With the number of merchants' they deal with, where and how would they start? After all they are financial, not technology companies. Their core business is the transactions themselves - not optional data.

CSP puts business customers on the front foot, ensuring critical data is passes to Conferma at the point a virtual card is deployed. This gives our customers centralised, standard, well formatted, upfront data with visibility of incoming charges, proactive not reactive.

Together with our partners, we're bringing our customers a level of data and insight that is unprecedented in the industry.

Simplifying Travel Settlement

2011-02-07T15:49:00.002Z

In travel, the majority of booking methods require a form of guarantee, primarily a credit card. This is how you're expected to book via the GDS, self booking tools, OTA’s or even over the telephone. When a card is available, it works pretty well; its quick, secure and all the backend processes work (for example, non-arrival or cancellation charges are billed back to the right travellers payment card). The suppliers like it, they don't have to chase an agent or traveller for payment as they refer back to the guarantee.

The problem comes for those travellers who aren't in possession of a corporate card. In a world where business is global and more employees, from all levels of business, have to travel - booking can be a pain. Where corporate cards are not available to the employee, an immediate barrier to travel is raised. Of course, the barrier can be overcome via varied clunky options. The traveller could chase down another colleague to use their corporate card (security alarm bells!), but what payment card is the checkout charge going to be settled with? Even agency level guarantee’s, such as IATA, doesn't solve non-corporate card holder travellers having to settle on departure. The traveller could choose to use their personal payment card and place a claim into accounts at a later date; not only is this problematic for the traveller, it also creates more work for your accounts department!

Without your own corporate card it is becoming more and more difficult to access efficient and simple business travel processes. By removing these barriers to travel your business could be better connected and more prosperous (your accounts department might also be happier?).

Billback powered by CSP embeds a unique virtual card into travel booking processes, enabling staff within a business to book travel and not have to worry about settlement. The card is never visible to the traveller or agent, increasing the security of the process. Card transactions are matched back to the original booking data which provides the greatest level of detail for reporting. The information is uploaded directly into the corporate or agency back office.

Last Friday we announced with we're partnering with Sabre to provide virtual payments directly into the GDS' flagship application, Sabre Red, empowering more travel agents to take-up CSP than ever before.

With both our travel agent, financial and technology partners we're enabling better business by simplifying travel settlement.

Community Product Development

2011-01-18T10:13:00.003Z

In a competitive industry such as business travel, are off the shelf tools best or build your own?

At Conferma we don't believe we have an "off the shelf" product, where we are the designers and everyone gets the same tool. We have a community developed product, Hotel Booker, which is flexible and used in so many different ways! Here is a quick overview of the Hotel Booker V4 development:-

The Conferma community consists of our technology partners, customers and their corporate clients. Hotel Booker is used every day by thousands of travel agents and corporate users, ensuring the new V4 (launched last July) was going to be accepted well had to be carefully considered by the team. We started our development in March 2010 with a number of meetings with the development and support teams to outline what we would change in the current V3 and the biggest frustrations our customers had with the current site. With a constructive list, the lead developer on Hotel Booker set off to design some rough outlines of how the site may look and function. Each week we would meet up and review the outline of the site, how our new amendments functionality was going to work, how clients were going to be selected, how best to work the hotel search from any page, what fields should be mandatory, etc... Lots of thought was given to the new site; for the first four weeks not a single line of code was written!

Once we felt we had a practical vision of the new site we consulted our agency customers to gain reaction. Overall the feedback was very positive! Customers liked the fresh new design, with some commenting (internally we knew this) - they thought we'd completely forgot about look and feel in V3! Our customers gave us some good points to consider and also requested functionality they wanted which we hadn't even thought of. In some cases customers gave comment on the same features but with slightly different feedback that the other hadn't thought of, it was then down to Conferma to take all the feedback and merge it into one solution as effectively as possible.

Over the coming months, we developed the design into a working site, checking back in with our customers to gain further reaction. The excitement we were generating was a little unbelievable; our customers really engaged with the products development and couldn't wait to use it in production.

After three months of development we moved the site into our live environment for beta testing with a few key agents. We released beta 2 a few weeks later after some key feedback, including further enhancements and fixes. It was encouraging to see our customers support us through this busy stage.

In late June we announced to the world V4 was now live and ready for action. Our customers began to flood to the new site - new corporate users loved it and agencies were beginning to win more business off the back of a strong customer facing booking tool and productivity gains. The development was a success thanks to the community!

So our customers have a great tool, but they are all competing with each and how can a corporate decide between which agencies to use? The fact is our customers may use the same platform but each one brings their own bespoke adaptation. Implementation strategies vary enormously with our customers; some are very self booker focused, some agency only, some use our Booking API and access our hotel content from other booking tools, the levels of integration depth with GDS and data hand-off all vary, some take advantage of CSP and some don't, some allow self bookers to amend and some don't... The agencies own business practice is taken into consideration; pricing, commercial relationships, other services such as VIP access and CSP reconciliation. The corporates have a lot to think of. The entrepreneurialism and creativity of our customers together with the flexibility of Hotel Booker gives our agencies the ability to remain unique. That’s what community based development is all about!!

Does community based product development work for Conferma? Absolutely, but more importantly, it works for our customers.

Happy New Year

2011-01-07T14:23:00.002Z

Firstly, let me wish a Happy New Year to all our partners and customers! Together we achieved a lot in 2010 and this year is going to be no exception; the team is already working on some exciting projects! We're ramping up our innovation and accessibility to our technologies to bring you fresh, cutting edge travel and expense technology throughout 2011.

Last year we spent time rebuilding our platform, redeveloping our core customer facing applications and expanding our financial partners. Throughout 2011 we'll be engaging with our customers to build on last years updates to take bigger leaps forward in the industry.

In Q1 we'll be updating Hotel Booker V4 with some exciting new features, they're all under wraps at the moment but we can't wait to release them into the live environment and see them being used. 95% of our customers are now migrated onto Hotel Booker V4 and the feedback has been great. With it's ease of use, connectivity, CSP support, community based development, configuration and deep integration into agency back offices, Hotel Booker is becoming a market leading booking tool for hotel bookings. Updates soon!

Last year the CSP platform grew from strength to strength. CSP is being recognised as the industry standard for billback - immediate payment, auto-reconciliation, finance partner neutral and tight integration into any platform. A strong network of CSP enabled travel companies is emerging. Launched last year, CSP On-Demand is truly in demand! Over the coming months merchants will start to see more payments powered by CSP, integrated into our partner systems.

Along with our financial partners, the team will be available at this years Business Travel Show on Feb 8-9th, Earls Court London. We have some great announcements that we're looking forward to sharing with you. If you'd like to schedule some time to speak to the team, please contact enquiries@conferma.com.

We're looking forward to a great year.

An industry reliant on faxing...

2010-10-01T17:23:00.003+01:00

In a world of billions of web pages, natural use of email and tightly integrated web services - why is the fax still important for business in 2010?

The word fax derives from the Latin word "fac simile", meaning "make similar". The first patent for a fax was recorded in 1843 by Scottish inventory Alexander Bain who created a pendulum based back-and-forth line-by-line scanning mechanism. The first commercial fax machine, named the Pantelegraph, invented by Italian physicist Giovanni Caselli went into production in 1861. Fax machines were invented and in commercial use almost 15 years ahead of the invention of the telephone!

Whilst the fax machine has had a fair number of competitors over the years, it's still here and we see the number on the footers of our emails and the adverts in the paper. It's the easiest way to securely send a document quickly. Business' still don't trust the internet for the delivery of data; often we receive DVDs or memory sticks hand delivered with a small excel file due to the authors not trusting the delivery of sensitive data via email.

We all understand the fax is also sent over the telephone network and it's just a print out at the other end - so why fax over email? Emails can send encrypted files, but the end users may not have the relevant skills or software to decrypt the file. As a rule email is NOT secure. As the Met Police advise, you should never send any confidential information to anyone through email.. Moreover from a suppliers point of view accepting credit card numbers by email may be in breach of merchant agreements, and lead to penalties being imposed by banks.

Receiving a printed document still feels tangible - something you can touch - and important, just as you were to receive an invoice from a supplier, therefore it's still managed with care and attention.

Acceptance of faxes within hotels is a natural business requirement and an entire workflow runs from the messages received via faxes. Our Conferma Settlement Platform (CSP) utilises faxing technologies to communicate the payment details in a PCI DSS manner. It wouldn't be possible to communicate payment details/card data to hotels via any other standard delivery manner that is secure, accepted and with a prompt delivery time.

To remove the fax communication to the hotel entirely online booking systems and suppliers should adopt functionality to accept explicit payment details and payment restrictions. This is some years away from reality, until then the fax is here to stay.

Enabling Mobile Payments

2010-09-14T12:58:00.003+01:00

With the launch of the iPhone App Store came a revolution, a restart and repositioning of what mobile applications should be. WAP was dead and mobile optimised websites were simply not good enough. Along came the mobile application; responsive, online, location aware and functional. Chasing after Apple's App Store came the Nokia Ovi Store, Windows Mobile Marketplace and Googles Android Market - each with their varied success, but all with a fresh look at enabling mobile applications for the end user. From games to sports, education to entertainment, navigation to news, productivity to photography - the applications available are broad in their appeal.

The highest downloadable applications have to be games - simple, addictive and on-demand, which are free in many cases. Newer games on all platforms are also coming into line with established handheld gaming devices such as the Sony PSP or Nintendo DS.

With regards to business applications however, download volumes are small. The availability of good business applications, be it hotel booking or general procurement applications are few and far between. There are many applications that provide location based hotel search, where the look to book ratio must be exhaustive. Mobile booking just isn't trusted. There are a few reasons for this; the client is using his or her phone so may as well dial the agent for them to book, the applications are not that user friendly or simply due to a slow connection speed where disconnects are frequent. However, one key issue stands at the fore, payment. Users still do not trust entering their card details into a phone for security reasons... Not to mention the vision of Mr Jones, the salesman, sat in a car park at 8pm, payment card in one hand, phone in the other - manually typing the card details into a phone with a sensitive keyboard or keys that are too small for his fingers. Not a great user experience.

Other attacks at the mobile payments are from the likes of PayPal or Google Checkout with mobile wallets, these are cumbersome in their implementation involving text messages and PIN numbers for authorisation.

Mobile purchasing only works successfully where you already have a card stored with the owner of the application, for instance you've stored your card on your Amazon account via the Amazon website, or your card details are already stored with Apple via iTunes. Essentially the accepted payment method, in a mobile purchase, is one click purchasing.

Earlier this year we launched the CSP On-Demand API, giving third parties access to the award winning CSP Platform in their own applications. This is being successfully rolled out at the moment with great momentum. Clients are learning that by not only linking in the system to their self-booking tools and desktop applications, that the mobile space is a fantastic opportunity to successfully take on. End users never have to see or enter a credit card into any application.

With the CSP On-Demand API and our card partners we're enabling mobile one-click payments to grow in the corporate procurement marketplace.

If you have a mobile application and are interested in learning more, get in touch.

Be brave upgrade!

2010-08-20T11:55:00.005+01:00

As a software company we face the key question of 'how are we best going to provide our products to our user base?' At Conferma we want to ensure all our products are easily accessible to our clients and updates are made available instantly. To this end we chose to build web based solutions, opposed to desktop applications. This enables our clients to access all our latest releases through a web browser like Internet Explorer or Firefox.

Web Browsers essentially allow you to browse websites (pages/documents) on the internet which are delivered in a presentation language called HTML (HyperText Markup Language). HTML was originally designed to combat the multiple formats universities were using to create documents, by using one format, HTML. The idea was anyone anywhere in the world could access them over the network. The project was started by Sir Tim Berners-Lee whilst he was working at CERN in 1989. Since then the Netcraft Web Server Survey (December 2009) estimates there are over 233.8 million websites exposing over 20.3 billion web pages.

The user experience of websites has exploded over the past few of years (remember that 2007/8 buzz word "web 2.0"?), they've become smarter, faster, more intuitive, desktop-like and all round more powerful. The browsers have enabled developers to do more by offering better support for presentation (CSS), faster JavaScript engines (client side scripts) with AJAX support and application level functionality such as tabbed browsing, plugin support and enhanced security features.

At Conferma we're committed to increasing efficiency in T&E processes by removing the unnecessary items and automating processes where possible and with the release of Hotel Booker V4 we've done just that. We've brought the number of pages down from 8 to 3, enabling bookings to be placed in less than a minute and enhanced the speed of both the profile and booking search - it's quick!

Efficiency savings can also be gained by upgrading your browser, for instance did you know Internet Explorer 6 is over three times slower than Internet Explorer 7 and that Internet Explorer 7 is twice as slow as Internet Explorer 8?

IE6 has served its purpose, but the fact is it's one of the worst performing browsers in terms of security and speed and is no longer supported by Microsoft. As a technology provider offering products over the web we find IE6 actually stifles our development potential by using developer resource to ensure our sites support it, rather than letting them innovate.

We fully encourage users look at the available browsers and upgrade, older browsers are wasting your time...

Conferma and the BBC

2010-06-21T11:28:00.006+01:00

There is a company who never fails to innovate in the UK, the BBC. Since its founding in 1922 the company has brought us technological media innovations matched by no other in its industry, from Radio to TV, Ceefax to NICAM, Freeview to iPlayer. I actually found myself watching the world cup on the iPlayer yesterday and it's amazing how much the BBC have developed that product over the past 30 months. Since the iPlayer launched the product has exploded with functionality; seven days catch-up, HD streaming, live streaming, subtitles, expansion to consoles and mobile platforms, series stacking, enhanced UI, favourites and social media integration - which is probably why in May 2010 they hit a whopping 130 million media requests. This is an example of a company who ceases to innovate work hard for its clients, the general public.

Conferma, like the BBC believes in driving innovation. Over the past year the team has broken new ground in the travel and expense industry and improved service to our customers.

To reflect on our achievements, here's just a few; we have...

- expanded our card partner line-up to include support for American Express and AirPlus, taking place next to Barclaycard Commercial!
- launched a range of innovative payment tools built on our award winning CSP platform; Event Trustee, CSP On-Demand API and CSP On-Demand Low Cost Air!
- saved our clients thousands of pounds worth of expense using our insightful Rate Analyser, offering in-depth market insight into hotel rates and their fluctuations!
- partnered with more agencies than any previous year!
- reached a great milestone of CSP usage in over 80 countries!
- migrated our entire data centre to the most advanced hosting technologies available, all without any customer impact!

Oh, and we completely rewrote our Self Booking Tool, named Hotel Booker V4! It's sporting a rather slick new design backed-up with powerful technology and innovation including; PNR integration, corporate travel policies, improved self-booking features including online client amendments, advanced additional information data capture, 80'000 hotel photographs, greater configuration options, etc.

Our clients have also enjoyed a good year with the updates to our Booking API and the launch of new CSP On-Demand API, which opens up our CSP Platform to allow clients to integrate into their established applications. It's really good to see clients integrating our services in new and exciting ways. For instance, earlier this year Micros Fidelio won the Travel Technology Innovation Award at the Travel Technology Show for their SABS Corporate tool, which is connected to our Booking API. Innovation backed up with our technology continues and there will be exciting announcements in this area soon.

As we are some 85 years younger than the BBC we have some way to go in matching their “institution” like status but like the BBC we are driving the innovation in our industry and watching others follow.

The Randy Quaid hotel bill: time to use billback

2010-04-29T09:01:00.000+01:00

The jailing this week of actor Randy Quaid (famous for being the drunken crop-sprayer in Independence Day and sheep farmer Joe Aguirre in Brokeback Mountain) and his wife shows just how expensive it can be if you fail to pay your bill when you leave a hotel. Expensive for hoteliers if you do a bunk and expensive for guests if they are subsequently caught.

The couple stayed at the exclusive San Ysidro Ranch in Santa Barbara, California last year, and it is alleged that they used an invalid credit card when paying the $10,000 tab. A standard room at the ranch, where Chris Martin of Coldplay and actress Gwyneth Paltrow got married, costs from around $545 a night. The Kennedy Suite, where JFK and Jackie spent their 1963 honeymoon, is a little pricier – $3,000 a night.

The Quaids were jailed not because of the bill itself – which has apparently been paid since - but because of their failure to turn up at court hearings. The judge was fed up with their no-shows and ordered them to be put behind bars. They got out four hours later after raising bail for a second time. Earlier bail payments of $40,000 have been forfeited, making it one very expensive hotel stay.

The couple wouldn’t have been in such a mess if they had been using the Conferma Settlement Plan system. The system uses virtual credit cards to make a payment on behalf of a travel management company, meaning that hotel guests do not use their own personal cards when they leave the hotel.

Volcanic disruption: how TMCs have been able to help stranded travellers

2010-04-19T19:15:00.002+01:00

The eruption of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano in Iceland has stranded anywhere between 100,000 and a million travellers overseas, and it is travel agencies who have borne much of the brunt of helping those abroad trying to get home by whatever means necessary.

Many travellers who have not booked through a travel agency have had to resort to their own ingenuity to get home – buying bicycles to take advantage of cyclist fares on ferries and paying taxi drivers thousands of pounds to get home. If the latest news from the Government is to be believed, some travellers might end up hitching a lift on HMS Ark Royal.
It is at times like these that travel management companies come into their own for getting business travellers home. Consultants who deal with travel plans day-in, day-out for business travellers, are the best placed to know all the possible alternatives when flights are grounded.

Yet just knowing the travel alternatives is not enough, a consultant needs to know where the travellers are in the first place. Conferma’s booking API, used by a number of travel management companies, is a good place to start. It allows the TMC to search for travellers by location, helping them prioritise those travellers who are in the greatest need.

Several of Conferma’s agency customers have been using the API in just this way over the past few days, helping their corporate clients’ travellers extend their stays or find an alternative place to stay or means of travel.
It doesn’t yet include booking places on HMS Ark Royal but the wide range of options have come as welcome relief to many who have been caught up in this unprecedented event.

Rate Analyser: a glimpse into the future

2010-04-15T16:15:00.001+01:00

Fast forward 10 years. The days of the 9-to-5 job for life have gone forever. The Con-Lib-Lab government elected in 2010 decided that Britain could only emerge from economic ruin by doing away with traditional working practices and introduced the ultimate in flexible working.

A Europe-wide e-auction system, introduced in 2012 after a £20 billion cost over-run, means that when you wake up each morning, a list of jobs for which you are qualified appears on your iPhone 5GS-3D holoscreen, You then tap in the minimum rate for which you are willing to work for that day. If you are successful you get out of bed and head to work, guided by the sat nav on your iPhone since you have probably never been there before.

It may sound far-fetched for employers to use technology in this way to pay their staff as little as possible but it isn’t really. Already, there are websites out there that do something similar. If you have ever needed to hire a designer, web developer, writer or PR expert, you might have come across a website called Elance which hands out work posted to freelance professionals based on the best price.
It is just the logical conclusion of the desire by people of today to get the best possible price for everything. People want to pay as little as possible for everything, whether that’s a freelance web geek or the latest CD from an X Factor runner-up.

Our own Rate Analyser tool for hotel bookings has the same idea behind it. This clever bit of technology hovers around in the background after you have made a hotel booking using our Hotel Booker tool. If the rate goes down before you depart for the hotel, it rebooks you at the lower price.

It really is a little piece of the future that has somehow found its way into the present. And if any employer out there wants us to build them a Wage Analyser, just get in touch.

The General Election, MPs and Westminster hotels

2010-04-12T09:28:00.002+01:00

So, we are going to have a General Election on May 6. That means we have weeks of claim and counter-claim, statistics and bare-faced lies, polls and more polls to look forward to.

Despite that, the election is an interesting one for a number of reasons. The fact that the outcome is likely to be the closest for years means that there is more to play for, particularly for the smaller parties, than for a generation.

Secondly, we will see a record number of MPs replaced, largely due to the fallout from the MPs’ expenses scandal. At least 150 MPs have announced that they are planning to stand down at the forthcoming election. Many others may elect to join them after it was announced recently that golden goodbyes of up to £65,000 will be banned from the next Parliament. Going now rather than in five years could make a big difference to their “retirement”.

Those new MPs will be working under a new expenses regime that is still currently being finalised. However, it is already clear that there will be new restrictions on MPs’ use of hotels, with a cap on the amount they can spend if they need to stay the night close to the Houses of Parliament.

However, even with a price cap they will have plenty of choice.

New MPs looking for somewhere to stay close to the Houses of Parliament – or their travel booker in their constituency, whether that is their spouse, an otherwise unemployed son or daughter or merely an employee - could do worse than looking at our hotel booking tool Hotel Booker.

The hotel booking tool lists 150,000 hotels around the world. Just within a mile of the House, there are at least 50 hotels available to book.

Hotel Booker, which includes a natty mapping function, shows that the five closest hotels to the Houses of Parliament are the Hilton London Trafalgar Square, the Sanctuary House Hotel, the Premier Inn London County Hall, the Marriott County Hall and the Park Plaza Westminster Bridge.

What that means is that our new MPs – whoever they may be – will still be within running distance of the House should the Division Bell sound while they are still sleeping off a late-night session (parliamentary of course) in their hotel bed.

Booking the right hotel at the right price

2010-04-01T15:07:00.000+01:00

This week’s Hotel Guest Survey, from research company BDRC, makes for interesting reading.

It shows that almost half of all business travellers have been asked to change their behaviour over the past 12 months in order to reduce costs. The survey showed that 44% of travellers have experienced an increase in the level of enforcement of their corporate hotel policies during the year. The most common change to policy has been the introduction of a cap on the rate that companies are willing to pay for their employees to stay overnight.

This is where a hotel booking tool, like Conferma’s Hotel Booker (http://www.conferma.com/Corporates/BookingEngine.aspx), comes in handy. A booking tool has the ability to enforce a new hotel policy without emotion. Yet a lack of emotion does not mean a lack of choice. Hotel Booker has a database of around 150,000 hotels worldwide, giving travellers a wide enough range of properties at every possible price point.

This works well for companies who just want to find the best rate on the day – something that is proving successful in a market where hoteliers are doing everything they can on rate to attract guests.

Yet Hotel Booker also helps those companies that have negotiated deals. Although the rate may not be the cheapest available, a night at a preferred hotel can come with other benefits – a better room, a more flexible cancellation policy or breakfast and internet access thrown in with the rate.

As well as cutting costs, Britain’s business travellers are also travelling slightly less. They spent four fewer nights away from home in 2009 than they did the previous year. Overall, UK plc spent 56 million nights in British hotels.

What is even more enlightening from the survey is the proportion of travellers who choose their own hotels – 53% of all travellers and a whopping 73% of frequent travellers. Since Hotel Booker can let you book a hotel in just three clicks, that gives time for highly recompensed executives to do what they are really paid for.

The 2010 Budget: the impact for TMCs

2010-03-25T18:35:00.002Z

Today’s newspapers are full of stories entitled “How YOU will be affected”. The annual round-up of how smoking and drinking single mothers, car-driving families with 2.2 children and pensioners will be affected by the Budget is as traditional as the appearance of the battered red briefcase outside 11 Downing Street.

But how will TMCs be affected by Chancellor Darling’s pre-General Election Budget?
For small TMCs, there are some extra benefits. The government is extending its Time to Pay initiative, which allows businesses to spread their tax payments over an agreed timetable.

Businesses will also enjoy a temporary increase in the level of small business rate relief. Small TMCs occupying properties with rateable values up to £6,000 will pay no business rates for one year from October while those benefiting from the rate relief taper (rateable values up to £12,000) will receive significant reductions.

One thing that was widely expected was an increase in the rate of VAT to 20%. Coming just after the return to 17.5% from the reduced rate of 15% on 1 January, perhaps this was unpalatable for the Chancellor when the election is just weeks away.
Travel management companies that have a significant number of clients in the public sector – a sector worth around £5 billion by some accounts – will have taken note of the Budget’s focus on costs.

It said that the Government had identified more than £11 billion that could be saved every year from 2012-13. High up on the list of ways to deliver these savings is the concept of “collaborative procurement”, a phrase scattered liberally throughout the full text of the Budget, made available just after the Chancellor sat down.
This means even greater efforts by Buying Solutions, the executive agency that looks after public sector procurement, in the area of travel. It will soon announce the winners of a vast £3bn tender to look after the travel requirements of everyone from central government down to local authorities.

There were no changes announced on air passenger duty. APD moved to a geographical footing base don the distance to the capital of the country where travelers are heading in November. Next November’s further increases are set to go ahead too. Looking at the small print, the Budget predicts that the unloved tax will raise £2.4 billion for Government coffers in 2010-11, up half a billion pounds on this year. To put that in context, that’s more than is raised by inheritance tax and almost as much as amount by the duty on whiskey and other spirits. Trebles all round!

Hotel bill extras: do you know what's being charged?

2010-03-22T16:43:00.001Z

An interesting news item has emerged from across the Pond. In the state of Minnesota, a bill that would have prevented state employees from staying in hotels that offered pay-per-view adult films that included degradation or violence has been kicked into touch.

While we are making no judgments here at Conferma on the rights or wrongs of this decision, it raises an interesting point. How do travel managers ensure that what their company’s business travellers charge to their hotel bills is both acceptable and within the corporate policy?

In-room movies are big business – thought to generate several billions of dollars a year – and while many business travellers are probably relating to George Clooney in the business traveller film Up in the Air, many others are watching adult movies.

It’s not just about adult movies either. It could be any additional charge that a traveller puts on their room, be it the cost of using the minibar or doing their monthly laundry using the hotel’s in-house service.

This is where using the Conferma Settlement Plan (CSP) comes into the picture. By ensuring that every hotel payment is reconciled with its related booking, companies can check to see that the actual spend equals what was booked. Deviations from policy can be quickly identified.

As you may have seen last week, the availability of CSP is set to become wider too. We have just announced a partnership to offer travel management companies and hotel booking agencies using travel payment provider AirPlus the ability to do hotel direct billing.

The AirPlus Conferma Hotel Settlement Solution will be available to AirPlus’ UK customers from the end of April.

Hotel billback: the HMRC agreement

2010-03-17T12:25:00.004Z

Hotel billback, where the payment of a business traveller’s bill is handled by a travel management company or hotel booking agency, has been overshadowed by changes to VAT legislation which could have seen corporate buyers facing sharply increased bills from 1 January. That was the date when new European VAT legislation came into force which meant that TMCs and HBAs could have been required to pass on VAT to their corporate clients, which they would subsequently be unable to claim back.

Representatives of the Hotel Booking Agencies Association (HBAA) and the Guild of Travel Management Companies (GTMC) have been lobbying HM Revenue and Customs to find a solution and an agreement was recently reached. The HBAA, for example, worked hard to make sure that whatever solution was reached should not be too onerous on corporate clients.

As a result of the agreement, billback suppliers now have to state explicitly they are working as an agent on behalf of the corporate client. TMCs and HBAs will no longer recover input VAT and charge output VAT and instead will charge a disbursement to the corporate client who will be able to recover the input VAT shown.
The agreement with the Revenue also calls for TMCs and HBAs to “identify on their invoices the hotel guest, their employer and ideally each will carry a unique reference number” (bold type ours).

Here’s where we at Conferma are able to help. Our revolutionary billback product Conferma Settlement Plan assigns a unique number to each billback booking – a virtual corporate card number - until the payment is reconciled.

Changes to tax and VAT legislation are never easy but the outcome has generally been positive. The changes will add some administrative burden to the TMC or HBA’s billback process and this may result in higher fees. However, they are unlikely to be anything like the 17.5% hike that having to pay the VAT would have meant.

The search for good hotel rates

2010-03-08T12:30:00.002Z

Finding a good deal for a hotel room seems easy. You speak to a travel consultant on the phone and tell them when and where you want to go and seconds later they come back with a selection of properties and prices. Alternatively, you fire up your favourite travel search website, plug in your details and moments later you have a range to choose from.

Yet these two fast processes show little of the enormous amounts of technology that sit behind the consultant and the travel website.

There are hundreds of thousands of places to stay in the world, ranging from tiny bed and breakfasts to vast, modern hotels with thousands of rooms that are part of a global chain.

When you do a search, either using a travel agency or a website, the details of all of those hotels have to be searched in an instant and the rooms they have available and the rates they will charge returned to you to make your choice.

For a hotel chain, that is relatively easy. Each hotel in the chain has a property management system containing the availability and rates connected to one or more of the global distribution systems (GDSs).
For a small, individually owned hotel, things are tougher. They usually have a database showing available rooms while the rates change rarely, because they do not have the technical sophistication to adjust rates dynamically according to demand. Sometimes these databases are connected to the internet via a so-called switch company, enabling people around the world to peer inside that database of availability.
The secret of finding a good hotel rate is having access to the widest range of all these types of hotel. Conferma’s Hotel Booker, for example, has access to 150,000 hotel properties worldwide, covering all sizes and shapes of property.

But how can all of that data be crunched so quickly, to give you a rate within seconds? If the hotel is on a GDS, getting a rate quickly is not a problem. Yet that covers only a small proportion of available hotels and even then there may be problems accessing a hotel chain’s property management system fast enough.
The answer involves some clever technology similar to that used by Google when you search for something on the web. Google does not search the entire internet in real time when you enter a search term. Instead, it relies on a snapshot of the internet it has made itself prior to you doing your search.

In the same way, the hotel rate you are quoted on an internet site is not necessarily what you will end up paying because the rate is a snapshot.

As a result, the rates you see show a fine balance fast search and accuracy. Tools like Conferma’s Hotel Booker, however, go further than taking a single snapshot of rates. Instead, it creates a guide rate that is the average of recent booked rates. No guide rate is allowed to get more than 14 days old and as a result it is amazingly accurate. On average, the guide rate is 97% of the ultimate booked rate. What that means is that there is a much smaller trade-off between accuracy and speed. What you see really is (or very nearly is) what you get.

How prompt payment can boost your business

2010-03-06T14:52:00.003Z

If there is one thing that is virtually guaranteed in a recession it is that companies, particularly smaller ones, take longer to pay their bills. When cashflow becomes problematic, because the orders are not flooding in, it is very tempting for companies to start paying their suppliers later. Of course, those suppliers then have their own cashflow problems and this cascades its way throughout the economy.

What happens then is that companies that become known as prompt payers start becoming increasingly attractive to suppliers. Smart companies realise that by signing up to initiatives that promote speedy payment, such as the Better Payment Practice Campaign in the UK, can use it to their advantage.

The travel industry is little different. However, late payment can become an even bigger problem because of the thin margins that many in the industry work on.

This is where many of our products, based around virtual credit cards, can become incredibly useful.
Take Event Trustee, our credit-based, automatic invoice settlement tool. It uses virtual cards to automatically pay pre-agreed event costs at pre-scheduled times and reconciles each item with the same unique number when it is booked, billed or paid for.

It helps event management companies and other agencies organising events improve their cashflow in two ways. Since pre-agreed payments cannot be made until an invoice has been received, hotels invoice you as quickly as possible. This means you can invoice your clients sooner.

At the same time, because the invoice is paid for by a credit company initially, you have longer to settle the eventual bill.

But that’s not all. Since you are paying suppliers, such as hotels, more quickly they may offer you better rates to pass on to your clients. And if there’s something that can help you survive an economic downturn better than anything else, a happy client is it.

Pop-ups and other unusual hotels of the UK

2010-02-28T12:50:00.007Z

It had to happen sooner or later: the pop-up trend has spread to hotels. Pop-ups have been with us for the past few years. They probably started with the fashion store Comme des Garcons, which opened up guerrilla stores, temporary shops in unusual buildings such as piers, warehouses and galleries. Other stores followed suit.

The trend then spread to bars and restaurants, with one of the most successful being the Reindeer, a Christmas-themed restaurant set up inside the old Truman Brewery in London’s Brick Lane which remained open for just three weeks.

Now, London is to get a pop-up hotel for five nights in the middle of March thanks to hotel chain Radisson Edwardian. It has converted a luxury American Airstream caravan – one of those iconic stainless steel ones – into a temporary boutique hotel room complete with flat screen TV and sound system. The ‘hotel’ will change location every night and will stop in London Zoo, Alexandra Palace, the South Bank, Covent Garden and the Old Royal Navy College in Greenwich.

The news of the hotel got us thinking about other unusual hotels around the UK. Our Hotel Booker tool has details of over 150,000 properties and the list includes some weird and wonderful places to stay. How about these?

Auld Kirk Hotel, Ballater. This Victorian Scottish Free Church building within the Cairngorms National Park was converted into a six-room hotel in the 1980s.

Crazy Bear Hotel, Beaconsfield. Crazy name,crazy hotel. Walk in here and you feel like an extra in Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge.

The Lime Tree,Fort William. This former clergy house overlooking Loch Linnhe is now an art gallery selling the works of landscape artist David Wilson and also offering B&B accommodation.

Malmaison Oxford. A former Victorian prison that still retains some original features including heavy metal studded doors, wrought iron stairs and three-inch thick steel doors.

The Old Railway Station, Petworth. The luxury of the Orient Express but without having to travel to Istanbul. This unusual property consists of four restored Pullman carriages and station house in the Sussex town.

If you own an unusual hotel that’s not on our extensive and fast-growing database, why not add it here?. It’s free to be included.

Why no-frills is set to become the new billback

2010-02-24T20:49:00.002Z

The opening earlier this month of a business lounge at Stansted airport for passengers of Ryanair was greeted by incredulity by some, who mock the airline’s business credentials. Yet there are undoubtedly those companies that use the no-frills airline because it is convenient. Say you are a fast-growing company on the Cambridge Science Park and you need to visit the headquarters of the Santander banking group in northern Spain – Ryanair’s route between Stansted and the Spanish city is perfect for your needs.

Now what happens if you are the business travel agency who handles the account of that Cambridge research company? How do you handle those Ryanair flights? As has been well-documented, Ryanair shies away from involvement in the GDSs. Perhaps the only option is to make a booking on behalf of the client using the agency credit card and then charge that on to the client, along with a £10 or £15 booking fee.
That is all very well, but the process is time-consuming, reconciling the payment a challenge and it also carries the credit risk on behalf of the client.

This is precisely where CSP On Demand, which we launched this Valentine’s Day, comes into its own. CSP On Demand is the settlement part of our award-winning Conferma Settlement Plan hotel billback service. The difference is that it can be used for any type of travel booking made using a credit card that you need to track, including no-frills airlines.

CSP On Demand assigns a unique virtual credit card number to the whole process, meaning the travel management company can keep track of the booking and invoice, providing valuable management information to the client and transferring the risk onto the credit card provider, such as Barclaycard or American Express.

This could mean the ability to offer lower transaction fees for the no-frills booking or an added service – the MI – for which you can charge. If, like many companies on the Cambridge Science Park, becomes a world beater, needing to make more of those Stansted-Santander flights, that is good news for everyone.

Tina, Lisa and the future of hotel booking

2010-02-22T12:21:00.002Z

In this age of austerity, many travel bookers will have become more familiar with Tina and Lisa. As travel budgets have been cut, many companies have decided to restrict their travel policies, making company travellers stay in lower rated hotels than they did in the golden age of the noughties when the mantra was often “anything goes”.

So who are Tina and Lisa? Anyone who has tried to make a Premier Inn or Travelodge booking over the phone will know them only too well. They are the automated telephone booking agents of the two budget chains. Tina, whose acronym means Travel Inn Now Automated, referring to the company’s former brand name, is based on technology from ScanSoft and Voice Genie while Travelodge’s Lisa is based upon speech recognition technology developed by a company called Fluency (now Syntellect).

Yet Tina and Lisa may eventually be forced into retirement. Online booking systems such as Conferma’s Hotel Booker interact directly with the reservations systems of the two companies through an API, bypassing the dulcet tones of Tina and Lisa. Luckily, Tina and Lisa are not easily upset and will probably go off to pasture without a whimper.

Indeed, the process may already have started. Just try to find the telephone booking number for Travelodge on its website. As with other travel companies who see the web as the future, such as easyJet, finding a telephone number is quite a challenge.

We should not be too worried. Tina and Lisa are both clever girls, but just try to get them to do something a little unusual and they will protest. Take our Rate Analyser tool. This will monitor the hotel rates for booked hotels. If the price dips, it will cancel and rebook at the lower price. Just try getting Tina and Lisa to do that.

The inevitable VAT rise to 20%?

2010-02-18T09:17:00.001Z

The Times this week reported that no matter which of the main parties wins the next General Election, and presuming that it isn’t the Lib Dems, we will see VAT jump to 20%. The paper reports that the move would generate an extra £13 billion for government coffers.

If the reports are true, it will mean that VAT will have jumped enormously this year. The rate only reverted to 17.5% from 15% on 1 January this year. There is clearly an enormous black hole in the public finances which needs filling and the VAT hike will go some way (although by no means all the way) to fill it.

The hike will worry travel buyers who are already concerned that they may have to pick up the VAT element on hotel billback transactions. The entry into force of the EU VAT Directive on 1 January seemed to indicate that TMCs would not be able to reclaim the VAT element of billbacks and instead would have to pass it on to the client. Buyers were inevitably nervous about the prospect of an additional 17.5% on top of their hotel bills. An extra 20% would be even harder to bear.

Whether buyers will have to pick up this charge is still uncertain. The legislation itself seems clear – that the VAT cannot be reclaimed (see http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/briefs/vat/brief7409.htm) – but there may yet have to be a test case on whether that is what HM Revenue and Customs will do in practice. Lawyers wanting to challenge the interpretation of the rule may choose to look at whether business travel agents should come under the definition of tour operators and whether billed back hotels really constitute part of a package.

Either way, it looks like we will all have higher VAT bills come the summer.

Travel technology: when yes sometimes means no

2010-02-18T09:02:00.001Z

In the business travel sector, it's sometimes hard to take in everything that happens in the second week of February. This is when the Business Travel (not forgetting the new "and Meetings" bit) Show takes over London's Earls Court 2 exhibition centre.

It's hard because nearly everyone decides that this is the best time to launch new products and services because it is one of the only times that travel buyers, suppliers and media covering the sector are all together in one place. We often hear about senior company executives and members of the Royal Family flying separately to avoid a business or constitutional crisis. Goodness knows what would happen to the business travel industry should some disaster ever occur at Earl's Court that week.

But enough of the digressions. The point is that there is an awful lot of new travel technology unveiled at the show, some of it better than others.

It is buyer beware, however. Anyone who has ever dealt with technology suppliers will know that they often over-promise and under-deliver. When asked whether a new technology has a particular function, the given answer is usually "Yes, of course" when the real answer is "Oops, we forgot about that".

The point is that although it is easy to get caught up in jargon, it is more important than ever to check that the technology you are offered really does what it says on the tin.

The most effective Man Utd players of all time

2010-02-11T11:57:00.003Z

As a Manchester-based company, it is perhaps inevitable that football is a constant topic of discussion in the office. Debates over whether Best, Charlton or Cantona is the greatest player ever to grace the pitch at Old Trafford will always rumble on.

But for every footballing genius like Cristiano Ronaldo there’s a duff signing like Brazil’s World-Cup-winning-but-ultimately-useless Kleberson to balance things.

Manchester United’s long term success can be put down to many things – money and management among them – but what perhaps is the most important of all is the team. What managers like Sir Alex Ferguson know, and predecessors Ron Atkinson and Sir Matt Busby knew, is that Man U’s performance is not about any one individual – although Wayne Rooney is clearly trying to prove Ferguson wrong this season.

What does this have to do with travel? The successful corporate travel manager has to emulate Ferguson and his ilk, putting together the right team to succeed. In business travel, this is not just about people – although they are vitally important – but also about choosing the right technology.

Like those star managers, you need to ensure that the whole system of people and technology works together smoothly as a team. Conferma’s booking and settlement technology is part of that team. We don’t compare ourselves with those high-profile strikers mentioned above but rather see ourselves as the lesser known full backs, wingers and midfielders who have been part of the Red Devils over the years and worked hard to deliver success to the team as a whole. That’s how it should be with a technology company; the slicker the process, and the less you know about how we achieve tha, the better as long as we deliver the right end results – savings for your company.

Reduce, reuse, recycle.

2010-02-05T15:46:00.003Z

Schools have always been known for teaching the three Rs – reading, writing and arithmetic – although in the past any child who pointed out that writing and arithmetic don’t begin with R would have earned a clip around the ear.

Schools these days have another three Rs that they are teaching their pupils – the environmental mantra of reduce, reuse, recycle.

It is a mantra that Conferma believes in too – and not just when it comes to the environment. CSP (the Conferma Settlement Plan) lets companies reduce the number of corporate cards they hand out to their employees and it reuses and recycles the card numbers in a very clever way.

Imagine you are a company with thousands of employees who regularly stay in hotels on business. You could issue corporate cards to all of those who travel. You could, but it could become logistically challenging and introduce greater risk of employee fraud. What if there were a way to create a bank of virtual cards which are used to pay for hotels only when they are needed. That is just what the CSP tool does.

Conferma has a very clever algorithm that works out the optimum number of cards to have in this virtual bank. When a hotel is booked, either through our own Hotel Booker tools or through a third party booking system based on our booking engine, the booking can be billed back to one of these virtual cards. That card is then taken out of circulation until the booking is reconciled, allowing the card number to be used as a virtual ID tag for the transaction.

In fact, because the card is only ever used in this virtual manner, there is no need to issue a card at all. What could be better for the environment than that?

OMG. TMCs, TLAs and APIs

2010-02-01T09:13:00.004Z

The travel industry is full of TLAs – three-letter abbreviations. Sometimes when you read an article in an industry magazine, you need to keep a glossary beside you just to keep track. You probably have an SLA with your TMC – which might be HRG, BCD, FCm – and another with your HBA – possibly Expotel or NYS.
Both the TMC and HBA will use a GDS to make their bookings and, increasingly, those bookings are made online, through an SBT.

New TLAs are cropping up all the time. Another one that is starting to make an increasingly regular appearance in the news is API and it is one that is going to become increasingly important in the future.

API stands for application programming interface which sounds very techie but is just a way for two different pieces of computer software to talk to each other. The API usually consists of a set of instructions on the form in which data will be shared and how the two pieces of software will initiate a conversation.

The general public is coming to learn more about APIs through social networking tools like Twitter and Facebook. APIs allow you to update your Facebook status and have it updated at the same time on Twitter. APIs also help people develop what are called mash-ups on the web. For example, there are websites you can visit where pictures are pulled in from the photo-sharing site Flickr and overlaid on top of a Google Map showing where they were taken. An API has made this possible.

In travel, APIs are what allow no-frills airline easyJet to put its fares on the GDS. They are also what allows our Hotel Booker range connect directly with the hotel inventory of Travelodge and Premier Inn.

We also use APIs to allow travel management companies to incorporate our hotel booking technology into their own self-booking tools. It is the API that makes the process go smoothly and appear seamless from the perspective of the booker.

But we are not stopping there. One of the most innovative things we do as a company is the settlement related to these bookings. This raises the exciting prospect of creating not only an API that handles booking but also an API that handles settlement.

A settlement API allows travel management companies and other travel suppliers to handle the booking themselves – and that could be of anything from a hotel night to a no-frills airline or train seat - and then hand over the payment and reconciliation element to Conferma. That’s very smart. OMG, as you might say in the world of TLAs.

The Awards Season

2010-01-28T17:23:00.003Z

It is now 12 months since Conferma – along with its partners Barclaycard and Portman Travel – picked up the Business Travel World award for best business travel product. The award was for Hotel Tracker, our corporate hotel booking tool which helps streamline hotel payments for corporate companies, booking agencies and hotels.

The reason Hotel Tracker won the best business travel product award was simple – the tool helps travel management companies reduce the financial risk associated with making hotel bookings on behalf of their corporate clients. Many TMCs end up making bookings for hotels on their own corporate cards, making a manual note of the use of the card and then charging that on to the corporate client. But with lengthy delays in some cases in reconciliation by the hotel supplier, the TMC would then be unable to bill the client and receive payment until possibly weeks later.

Hotel Tracker gets round this by charging a hotel stay to a Barclaycard Business Hotel Tracker account on the guest’s departure. The tool’s booking and settlement platform then helps the tMC to track payments, provide data consolidation and issue prompt and accurate monthly transaction reports.

Before introducing Hotel Tracker, Portman Travel had four team members were responsible for reconciling invoices for the hotels division of the business alone. Naturally, the costs of that team were passed on to Portman’s corporate clients.

Winning an award was a great accolade but companies that gain industry plaudits sometimes rest on their laurels. Not Conferma. Since the award for Hotel Tracker, we have launched Rate Analyser, a browser-based, rate optimisation tool for hotel bookers and worked with some other major travel management companies on some very clever pieces of technology to make the settlement process as smooth as possible.

We like winning awards, of course, but knowing that our clients can be more efficient and save money by using our tools is reward enough for us.

Corporate New Year Resolutions

2010-01-14T21:24:00.003Z

How are the New Year’s resolutions going? If you are most people, the answer is probably pretty badly.
Every year, there are countless surveys which aim to find out what the most popular resolutions are and the top few are inevitably the same from year to year (with a little shuffling), indicating that people clearly do not keep their resolutions from one year to the next.

The top resolutions, in no particular order, are to get your finances in order, lose weight and drink less. All are clearly inspired by the bloated and extended Christmas period immediately beforehand. In fact, two weeks into the new year, many people have already ditched their resolutions. One survey says that a third of people have broken their resolutions by the end of January.

Putting aside personal resolutions, what could corporate travel buyers resolve to do in 2010? Here are Conferma’s suggestions:
Spend smarter. You have been doing this already in 2009 but there’s no reason why you shouldn’t make every travel pound spent really count. This means tougher negotiating with suppliers and seeing whether a corporate deal or best price on the day is better for you.

Travel less. There is good travel and there is bad travel, no matter how well managed your organisation. Cut out some of the bad stuff – pointless internal meetings spring to mind.

Monitor your employees’ expense claims better. Do you really know what a scribbled ‘subsistence £120’ means on your employees’ expense return? Does it mean the odd glass of orange juice grabbed between endless meetings or is it indicative of the minibar being emptied?

Hang on a minute. This all looks very familiar – finances in order, lose ‘weight’ and drink less. Some things never change? Let’s hope your company manages to keep to these corporate resolutions better than most people do their personal ones.

The hotel key card myth and other security scares

2010-01-08T17:14:00.001Z

If you travel on business and are of a curious nature, it is likely that during some idle moment on an otherwise busy trip, you will have stopped to wonder what exactly gets stored on the various cards you have on your person.

There is the old chestnut about room keycards, for example. There are plenty of scare stories going around about how key cards contain enormous amounts of personal data, including your credit card number, date of birth and – if you believe the scariest of the scare stories – the full details of any in-room movies you might have watched last night.

In fact, while hotel keycards have the potential to store any sort of data – including your lottery numbers if you so wish – they are configured only to use the scantest of essential information. This usually means your room number along with date and time of arrival and departure. The idea that they are encoded with your credit card data is an urban myth.

The information held on the magnetic strip of your credit and bank cards is another source of intrigue, not least because of the headlines about card readers attached to ATMs that regularly surface.

In fact, thanks to an organisation called PCI, you can find out exactly what’s on your magnetic strip and you can see this below.

As you can see, there is very little space for information and most of it is the same information that is printed on your card but in an electronic form.

But unlike hotel key cards, there is some information on your magnetic strip (or increasingly on the chip) that could come in very handy for a scammer and that is the information to the right of the diagram labelled with the words VIOLATION TO STORE.

These last few pieces of information relate to your PIN and the three-digit security code printed on the front or back of your card. It is exactly this information that means the use of credit and other financial cards is much more tightly regulated than hotel key cards.

This is where PCI comes in. This global forum was set up in 2006 by five payment companies including American Express, Mastercard and Visa. One of the key functions of PCI is to set standards for the handling for this sensitive information - the so-called PCI DSS specification.

The specification is highly prescriptive, making it hard for just anyone to set themselves up to handle cards and that is as it should be. We know how important security is and that’s why we are PCI DSS compliant.

So now you know what’s on the back of your card, you can rest easy in the knowledge that no-one else will find out.

Conferma and Neutrality

2010-01-04T12:42:00.003Z

It is now almost a year since Conferma won the award for best business travel product at the 2009 Business Travel World awards.

The award highlighted Conferma’s relationship with two of its partners Barclaycard Commercial and Portman Travel. Yet many people do not realise that Conferma works with many partners on a neutral basis – you could say it is the Switzerland of the corporate travel world.

Conferma has a clear policy of working with many different GDS companies, direct content suppliers, travel management companies and card providers.

While most people associate us with Barclaycard for the latter of these categories, we actually work with others too in this spirit of neutrality. Our recent deal with American Express is a case in point.

The deal means that American Express Global Commercial Card customers can use the Conferma Settlement Plan facility. It works by using a virtual American Express account number and travel bookings can be tracked right from the moment that something is booked to the point it is settled.

You won’t see us working with every Tom, Dick and Harry – we do have standards, naturally. Yet a whirlwind has hit the travel sector, bringing the barriers between companies that tended to work in their own little silos crashing down. This “glasnost” – in part prompted by the internet - is not over yet. At Conferma, we fully intend to continue in that same spirit and hopefully, with the support of our many partners and customers, win a few more awards along the way.

For hotels less down is the new up!

2009-12-17T11:24:00.003Z

If anyone is looking for the green shoots more than anyone else in this recession it is hoteliers. It is now more than a year since the shock collapse of Lehman Brothers and its aftermath sent hotel occupancies plummeting around the world.

Some hotel sectors have done better than others. Five-star hotels have been challenged as company’s reshaped their corporate travel policies, forcing travelling executives to downgrade to four and even three-star properties. Budget chains have also benefited although perhaps not as much as they would have liked; the problem for them is that the three and four star properties above them have become cheaper and look more appealing than a no-frills room.

It was interesting to see the latest financials from the UK’s biggest hotel chain, Premier Inn, recently.

In its interim management statement t his week, parent company Whitbread announced a turnaround for the budget chain.

The company said it had seen some success in further widening distribution channels. The company had already started doing this – the chain signed a distribution deal with Conferma back in 2007 to distribute its rooms to TMCs. The company also said its business account is doing well – there are 12% more customers this year than last.

So what about the results themselves?

“At Premier Inn, the decline in like for like sales has halved in the last three months. Regional revpar at Premier Inn year to date is now showing a reduction of 7.9% against the hotel market drop of 11.1%. Our commercial action plan is delivering,” said chief executive Alan Parker.
A few months ago, a speaker at a travel conference made the observation that “flat is the new up”, meaning that anyone who could maintain their previous level of business was about as good as could be expected.

Several months on, it is now clear that “less down is the new up”.

VAT the Travel Trade and Alistair Darling

2009-12-10T09:17:00.004Z

Alistair Darling’s Pre-Budget Report (PBR) today contained few surprises apart, perhaps, from the reduction in bingo duty from 22 to 20% - that’s certainly going to stimulate the economy then.

Perhaps the biggest non-surprise was that Darling confirmed that VAT would revert to 17.5% from its current reduced rate of 15% on 1 January 2010.

Some will have breathed a sigh of relief that VAT was not increased to a much higher level to plug the gap in public finances (the UK’s net debt is forecast to be 78% of GDP by 2014-15 even with the return of VAT to fits former rate). Some analysts had suggested that VAT would rise to 20% or even 22.5%.

But while we are now clear on what the rate of VAT will be on 1 January, there is still some uncertainty over the treatment of VAT for billback services provided by hotel booking agencies and travel management companies.

New Year’s Day 2010 is also the date on which the UK implements changes to the Tour Operators’ Margin Scheme (TOMS). Although this sounds irrelevant to the business travel industry, it may have substantial implications.

The changes to TOMS, which the UK has been forced to implement as part of the European VAT Directive, say that from that date travel companies that buy in services and sell them on to businesses “for their own consumption”, eg business travel for employees, will no longer be able to claim back the VAT. In the case of hotel billback, this could mean the travel company will have to pass on the VAT charge to the business. Suddenly, businesses would be facing 17.5% higher costs (although thankfully not 20 or 22.5% after today’s PBR).

A brief from HM Revenue and Customs at the end of last week (http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/briefs/vat/brief7409.htm) appears to say there is no way out for the UK’s agencies. However, many are likely to challenge this interpretation, via their accountants and legal teams. A substantial and unexpected VAT bill is the last thing that agencies want at the moment.

Checking out in 2010

2009-12-07T12:14:00.004Z

The hotel check-out queue: one of the biggest headaches of business travel. Invariably, you are racing off to a meeting or the airport and there are suddenly ten people in the queue in front of you and only one person behind the counter.

Part of the problem is check-out times. The hotel industry is remarkably standardised when it comes to check-out times. With few exceptions, the latest guests can check out is usually between 10am and noon unless they fancy paying a hefty premium for the privilege.

Some people have argued that the way around the problem is for hoteliers to throw off the shackles of standardised check-in and check-out times and embrace flexibility.

A number of hotels already do so. The Peninsula Beverly Hills in Los Angeles is perhaps the hotel with the highest profile that allows guests to stay for 24 hours from the moment they have checked in. Others do too: The Quality Inn Sabari in Chennai, India and The 13 Coins Tower Ratchada in Bangkok for example. Yet they are in a tiny minority.

There may be about to become more prevalent. China has just changed the guidance on check-in and check-out for its hotels aimed at overseas travellers. Until recently, if you stayed in your room after midday but left before 6pm you had to pay an additional half day rate. If you checked out after 6pm, you had to pay for another full day. New guidance issued earlier this year by the China Tourist Hotels Association now means that hotels can be flexible with their check-in and check-out times.

Hoteliers argue that such flexibility comes at a cost. At the moment, they can employ the bulk of their housekeeping teams and front desk staff for just the short window between 10 and 4pm, keeping their costs down. Instead, most just tell guests they can have a late check-out but they must pay a premium – ostensibly to cover the additional staff costs. It’s hard to see that changing any time soon.

But 24-hour check-out is one answer. Making check-out slicker is another. Services such as CSP (the Conferma Settlement Plan), check-out kiosks and electronic check-out from your in-room entertainment system can also make the queue shorter and move more quickly. For hotels not in a position to offer that, perhaps the answer is to offer departing guests in-queue entertainment.

The biggest story to hit the newspapers this year...

2009-11-30T17:41:00.004Z

The biggest story to hit the newspapers this year has been, without a doubt, the revelations about MPs’ expenses.

In an effort to draw a line under the scandal, Sir Christopher Kelly and the Committee for Standards in Public Life published a report in early November that makes recommendations on what MPs should and should not be allowed to claim.

MPs' Expenses and Allowances: Supporting Parliament, safeguarding the taxpayer is a substantial document – 144 pages – so few people, other than journalists, will wade through it in its entirety.

It is interesting to see what the Kelly report has to say about hotel expenses.
Under the old system, MPs were allowed to claim up to £24,222 every year to cover their hotel bills when they were away from their principal residence. In 2007-08, Parliament sat for 165 days. That means MPs could spend £146.80 a night on a hotel. At rack rate, that would get you a night at the Ramada Ealing.

Interim measures introduced when the scandal broke imposed a cap on hotel bills of £1,250 per month, reducing the average per day to a shade over £90. If MPs were paying rack, this would probably stretch to a Travelodge in London.

So what will the Kelly report mean for MPs who stay in hotels?
The Kelly Report suggests that an independent regulator set an upper limit for overnight hotel costs, with a hint that £120 per night (plus VAT) might be a suitable upper threshold. That budget might just stretch to a Novotel.

But of course, MPs do not need to stay in a hotel every night of the parliamentary year and they will pay nowhere near rack rate. Taking both into consideration, MPs could probably stay in any hotel they choose in London. And with five-star hotels looking a little empty these days, MPs might be staying in some very nice places indeed.

The last thing you will probably be worrying about this New Year’s Eve...

2009-11-24T11:58:00.016Z

The last thing you will probably be worrying about this New Year’s Eve is VAT. You are more likely to be thinking about where to grab your first kiss of 2010 or quickly thinking up a few resolutions that will inevitably be broken a few days later.

But if you are staying in a hotel that evening, your host may be worrying about just that. The temporary 2.5% reduction in VAT to 15% that was introduced in response to the wobbling economy will be reversed at midnight on 31 December 2009.

So what happens in the hotel bar around midnight? Do hotels have to reprogram your tills just as Big Ben’s bongs sound out to add 2.5% to the cost of a bottle of bubbles.

Luckily, the HM Revenue and Customs has said it will be flexible and let hotels (and other businesses such as bars) charge 15% until 6am. It will also turn a blind eye to any minor mistakes made in accounting for VAT over the New Year.

Whether HMRC will be as lenient with businesses who make mistakes as a result of the entry into force of new European VAT rules on the same date – when B2B supplies of services will begin to be taxed at the place where the customer is established and no longer at the place where the supplier is established – remains to be seen.