The Awards Season

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.