Cruise the web, see the web.

Corportate travel agents are increasingly having to share the spoils of business travel with others, write Chris Tolhurst.

Steve Sherlock wants you to think of the his new search engine Oodles.com whenever you rent a car. Launched five months ago, the Melbourne-based Oodles is the latest aggregator or comparison travel website to start life in Australia. It gives users access to the real-time rates of five major car companies, allowing them to compare rental prices before making a purchase.
"We hook directly into the reservations systems of all the major car rental companies so our rates directly reflect what their systems are doing, " Sherlock says.

Rates can move up and down significantly in the course of the day because car rental firms manage their fleets so that prices will automatically fall when there are alot cars available.

Sherlock, a former travel agent, says consumers previously could only access live rental rates though agents using inhouse General Distribution Systems (GDSs), such as Sabre and Galileo, to link with travel supplier systems. Because suppliers pay a booking fee to the GDSs for each agency-handled sale, this can be a costly distribution process.

"The car rental companies that we are dealing with are embracing the technology platform XML to feed out their live rates," Sherlock says. "What we are finding from users is that they want to compare the best live rates directly from each car rental company, and they’re saying, "We’re sick and tired of going from website to website to do it."

The online travel market has become a three-cornered contest. The choice today between airlines and other supplier sites, travel agency sites (such as Expedia and Zuji) that offer a huge choice of airlines and hotels and the aggregator seach engines such as US systems Cheapflights.com and Kayak.com, as well as Australia’s Wotif.com and Webjet, that seach for prices among a range hotels, airlines consolidator and airlines.

Online travel agent help travellers find fares, room or cars and then book them, usually charging a fee for the service they provide. Travel seach engines have a different business model. With the US-based search engines, the customer typically chooses a preferred fare or hotel and clicks through to make apurchase directly with a hotel or airline.
These travel search engines don’t charge the customer anything. The make their money from refferal fees paid by the supplier and advertising on their websites.

The problem for users is that sites tend to be country specific. Neither do they have every fare or hotel because some airlines aand suppliers won’t let their fares and deals be posted on third-party websites. And the differences between online agents and aggregators sites can be razor thin. Webjet, for example, calls itself an aggregator but it charges a $16.95 processing fee for each domestic return air fare it sells.
Webjet managing director David Clarke says there have been big advantages in the online booking of international airlines in the past two years. He says Webjet has moved from being able to provide only simple point-to-point, one date screen displays for international trips to incorporating all journey information and taxes in the one display. The search engine has also launched a "deal finder" mechanism and now permits stopovers to be incorporated into international intineries.

"The most inportant changes – and we are the only people in Australia doing it – is that we have introduced a deal finder, " Clarke says, "The way this works is that after you have selected a particular date and you have all flight details, stopovers and taxes, one click will bring [the booking] up for 14 days before and 14 days after your selected date for all of the carriers available. If you fly two days earlier there might be a $200 or $300 saving."

Online agents are increasingly offering tailored booking tools to business travellers, particularly to unmanaged business travellers working for small and medium sized enterprizes.

By allowing employees to book their travel directly on the web, companies miss out on getting the detailed reporting information on expenditure and the benefits of controlling spending through a travel management policy.

Providing the information and management is one of the major services that corporate travel agents offer to companies.

But Clarke says the smaller Australia businesses now do not have to report in much detail as they use to.

"The very large companies do [require reporting]," he says. "But for the smaller end of the business market, which the market that we probably tap into more easliy, reporting comes on the credit card statements anyway. The issue now is being able to easily compare prices [and] trying to find the deal."

Sherlock says with the advent of Virgin Blue and Jetstar, financial managers of small businesses and some large corporations now tell their employees to just get the best deals.
However, consultant Ian Marshmand, a director of Travel Strategy, says local corporate agents are experiencing boom trading conditions and there is no evidence of a shift away from using those consultants to manage spending and negotiate the best deals.

"Corporates don’t book direct – they have all tried it and they have all given up because the travel policy, the ability to report overall travell, makes that almost impossible," he says, "If you are a company with 50-odd people, or even many hundreds of staff, and each person is allowed to book their own travel direct, then you won’t have the faintest idea what’s going on.

Agent Max Najar, head of Adelaide’s Axis travel, also says corporate agents are doing excellent business and cautions against booking on third-party sites.

Najar say some hotels don’t like bookings from third parties on the internet and will honour a booking if the hotel hasn’t received payment from the third-party by the time the cusomter arrives at the reception desk.
"Hotels get 97 percent guaranteed booking when it is booked through a GDS such as Sabre, Galileo and Amadeus and they also have an IATA (International Air Transport Association) number to track the booking, so if there is a no-show, they can charge a one night no-show fee," Najar says.
"I think the good online travel agencies have got a great future. But you don’t know who are the good quality online travel agencies. If the booking has come through a third-party and they haven’t transferred the money to the hotel or the airline, you are totally stuffed."