I’ve consulted for few clients on travel agency selection process, and I must tell you …There are many agencies out there who would inflate their claims of how wonderful their agency is. It is really difficult to differentiate true claims to false ones.
The National Business Travel Association's Technology Committee had some fun today spicing up the otherwise dry topic of request for proposals templates for corporate online booking with a live "
Family Feud" game show. Based on a survey of 100 travel managers, the panelists dinged and buzzed the crowd to online booking enlightenment.
[UPDATE: Mary Ann McNulty conducted a fascinating interview with IHG SVP Stephen Powell on this topic.
See it here if you're a subscriber to
The Beat. Thanks for Stephen Boggs for helping arrange...]
InterContinental Hotels Group last week issued a press release and then declined to set up a phone interview for one of our reporters to discuss it with an executive. While other companies have done this, they usually don't also do what IHG's press contacts did next, which is to argue with us about why we're not willing to provide questions by email. An "interview" (duh!) is conducted in real time. Yes, reporters may sometimes ask questions by email, but for us that's normally just a matter of fact checking. It's not an interview. All of this makes me wonder what IHG is hiding after a press release (which is not posted to its Web site) indicated that the company is pushing "preferred business accounts" in the Asia-Pacific region to adopt dynamic pricing, which it said provides an "alternative" to annually negotiated rates.
