The Global Business Travel Association (GBTA) – the voice of the global business travel industry had a record breaking 2011 GBTA Convention in Denver, Colorado last month. Over 6,000 people attended the event, amongst which were 1,200 travel buyers, making this one of the largest GBTA Conventions in its history.
The RateTiger stand at the convention experienced a good show with a large number of pre-confirmed visits gaining a lot of interest among travel buyers. The main topics of discussion revolved around identifying how real-time hotel rate benchmarking can best benefit the corporate travel market and the individual corporate travel manager.
Travel managers mostly use historical rate data for price-comparison; but they know that real-time benchmarking will take the industry to a new level, which led to their added interest in RTCorp. This product fulfills two main areas of demand for the corporate travel managers – (a) To show supervisors how their negotiated hotel rate compares against publicly available rates on the internet to support their negotiations; (b) To provide corporate travel managers with email alerts that identify future instances where the publicly available rates may be cheaper than their negotiated rates and therefore provide them with the opportunity to renegotiate with those hotels in advance of their travelers booking their travel. In addition corporate travel managers are looking for a tool that audits their negotiated rates and availability across their chosen GDS.
Another point of interest for us was RateTiger’s nomination for the GBTA Travel Innovation Award 2011 under the Travel Management category. This was very encouraging for us given that RTCorp was launched to the corporate travel segment only recently. We look forward to coming back to the GBTA convention next year for many more productive discussions and yet another meaningful show.
Mark Neter is the Sales Manager for RTCorp. He is based out of Orlando, Florida and can be reached at markn@ratetiger.com
RateTiger launches hotel price transparency tool
Travel technology company RateTiger has launched a new tool that allows hotels to assess its room prices across the trade and retail. The price shopping service, named RTSnapShot, will alert hotels over price discrepancies online through a one-off report service. It is aimed at helping companies better understand rate performance during a specific location or event.
“We’ve been inundated by requests from corporations and travel management companies to tailor our RTCorp service to allow them to get just a snap shot of the hotel marketplace,” said Keith Watson, Division President – RTCorp at RateTiger. “Whilst many of our customers need to receive regular rate data to monitor prices, some in the corporate space need it only monthly or quarterly dependent on events or budget planning. RTSnapShot gives them only the most relevant pricing data without long-term commitment to an ongoing subscription, making better sense for budgets and rate planning.”
http://www.traveldaily.co.uk/AsiaPacificNews/Detail.aspx?Section=23254