| It's That Old
Fashioned Service
By: David J. Wardell
© 1998 By: David J.
Wardell. Reproduction or redistribution in any form without
written permission is strictly prohibited. |
||
| Among the better attended panels at Travel
Weekly's 1998 conference in Nashville was a session discussing the
merits of on-line corporate travel booking systems.
The speakers rehearsed at length how benefits flowed unceasingly to those who take control of their own reservations and tickets. Charts described the cost benefit of putting a few agents in an in-house travel department out of work while salespeople and executives did the work themselves online. Perhaps the flaws of that analysis were lost on those participating, but today's generation of online tools don't eliminate much work-it has to go somewhere and the cost of shifting travel management from clerks to senior revenue-producing staff invariably falls out of the figures somehow. My favorite quote was from the corporate travel manager panel member who said that he purposely builds extra waiting time into the travel department telephone hold system so as to discourage people from calling and make them book online. "If you jerk people around enough" you can get them to do what you want, is the essence of the quote. Hmm ... somehow I have doubts that this dialogue will form the basis for a new PR push by self-booking enthusiasts. Is it just my simple-minded nature, or wouldn't you think that the joys of self-booking would be sufficiently evident that travelers needn't suffer negative reinforcement? |
