Video: Rebook, relax, repeat: How Emburse Reshop changes the travel game | Duration: 1764s | Summary: Rebook, relax, repeat: How Emburse Reshop changes the travel game

Transcript for "Rebook, relax, repeat: How Emburse Reshop changes the travel game": Hello, everyone. We're gonna get started. We got a lot of information to cover today. I'm so glad you could join us for today's webinar. Rebook, relax, repeat on Burst reshop changes of the game, the travel game. I'm Lauren Boyd, your customer marketing manager here at Burst and your host for today. Just a few housekeeping items before we get started. This webinar is being recorded, and you'll receive the recording afterwards. Check out the engagement area on your right. The q and a tab allows you to ask questions. The document tab allows you to download useful resources. Also, there will be a few poll polls throughout the webinar, and you can find them in the polls tab. To schedule a follow-up meeting, click request a follow-up button at the top. And just a quick overview of the agenda. Like I said, lots to cover. And now over to you, David. Thanks, Lauren. Hi. My name is David Molliffe, and I'm responsible for travel products at Ambers. Travel products are a new feature of Ambers. Just joined within the last year, and what we bring to the table are a variety of resources that are designed to help our customers be able to optimize the cost of travel, and, ultimately, get value out of the product, not just expensing, travel, but also being able to save money on travel. We'll talk more about that in the next, 25 ish or so minutes. But before we get started, let's start with a quick, a quick poll. So the question I have is, how are your employees currently booking travel? Are they booking via online booking tool or they're your travel agency or travel management company? Are you completely unmanaged? Everybody kinda does their own thing, or do you have some sort of internal homegrown solution? I'll give you guys a minute. Looks like those bars are starting to move around. So far, the the popular guy is the travel management company. But there's a handful of unmanaged travel catching up. Yeah. I think we'll close the poll right now. Okay. So we got we're gonna we're gonna call it 5050. Some people work with travel agencies and some people just do their own thing. Really helpful to know. So in talking about travel, there's a handful of challenges. I mean, a lot of people like to focus, at the small to midsize company on, know, how do I just make sure we fulfill the travel and get the travel the get my people where they need to be. But keeping in mind that travel is a very significant investment that companies make to be able to optimize, their ability to, you know, save money, close deals, be able to fulfill regulatory environment requirements. There's a lot of things that people are focused on and then, you know, one of the biggest ones that we we focus on is the idea of raising prices, you know, particularly after the pandemic. Hotel companies have been very successful in airlines at at raising the price of, travel, which has certainly made that investment more expensive to invest in. But, of course, other things like the traveler experience, if you have a travel policy at your company, making sure the the travelers follow that travel policy. And then there's some more managed travel attributes like sustainability. Can you track your carbon footprint? Are you making the most, decisions you can, as it relates to, traveling sustainably? And then duty of care. Do you have a responsibility to making sure that you know where your employees are at any time? That's something that, is very common in some programs. Others, you know, just make sure you just send them a text, let them know where you are. But some people, when they have much larger environments of traveler, you have to make sure you're keeping track of that. Before we go too deep into some of the stuff, though, I got a couple more questions I wanna ask, which will kind of frame the rest of the conversation. The first thing we wanna know about is, you know, what is your company's biggest challenge in managing travel costs? So those five things I just talked about, rising prices due to your care, sustainability, traveler experience. What comes to mind in terms of the thing that keeps you up at night when it comes to managing travel? Looks like those bars are starting to move. Couple people on raising prices. Some sustainability going on over here. Travel experience. Yep. Gotta make sure you get that upgrade. Absolutely. The raising prices. Okay. Yeah. I think let's close this one. Okay. Raising prices is very important. I've got one more I'm gonna hit you guys up with, and then the rest of it will be all content. The next one has to do with how much do you spend on travel. And when we say manage travel, we're talking about travel that you can track. Travel that's either getting expensed, travel that goes through your agency. Are you less than $5,000,000? Are you 5 to $20,000,000? Are you more than $20,000,000? Looks like we got a bit of a distribution between these three things. Actually, a lot more people in the 5 to $20,000,000 bucket. Very good. Very good. Actually, even some people are spending more than $20,000,000 travel. Okay. So managing travel is is obviously a very important, component of who's listening on the phone because at the end of the day, what you wanna make sure you're doing is you're investing that $20,000,000 or so as quickly and as, appropriately as possible. So one thing that we've brought to the marketplace is the concept of an assistant monitoring prices. And I'll go in deeper into what I mean by that. But at the end of the day, we know that prices of hotel rooms and airline tickets move constantly, and nobody really has time to be able to look to see what the right prices were. You know, did I book the right price? You know, everyone makes the joke about on the airplane, you know, 2 people sitting and talking to each other, and they're paying different prices, and they wanna know how much they paid. We know that there's dynamic pricing going on in travel. And so what we've built at Imbursed is a tool to help you be able to monitor those prices and be able to take advantage of opportunities where pricing has gone down. That's what, Enbridge reshop is. Enbridge reshop is part of your travel program, and it works behind the scenes and based on the configuration requirements that you set up in the tool. It's able to find, better prices based on what you tell the traveler or tell tell the program to do to be able to find better prices. We also are able to help you keep your travelers on policy by making sure that they're booking the right places. And if they don't, we help we help you fix those decisions for them. We give you a lot of actionable insights that give you some very specifics on how to better manage your travel program, how to get better compliance, how to better manage your spend, and how to make sure that your suppliers are actually giving you the value that you're looking for. Let me show you an example of what I'm talking about. So reshopping essentially works this way. And like I said a couple slides ago, the idea is if I book at $249, the original booking, and other prices hap show up between the day that I made the reservation and and the day that I travel, are you taking advantage of those opportunities? In this particular situation, we have a traveler who's booked the best available rate. They booked a king rate. And at the same time, at the same hotel, a room with a queen-size bed is available for 2/24. Now, certainly, you know, traveler experience is very important. And if that traveler wants to have a king-size bed, then that may be the way you wanna keep it. However, if you're interested in saving, the 20, $25 or so, you can do that right on the spot, and then Trippant will or Enbridge ReShop will find that for you immediately. But then let's say you actually have a $199 negotiated price of that hotel. Well, you know, Embraer's reshop will find that maybe a day or 2 later, make sure that they they book that and rebook it down to that 199. But then you also have this dotted line which represents the retail price. And at day 8, the retail price dipped below your negotiated price. We're able to rebook that at 163 and ultimately saving you $86 per night in this particular example. But the idea here is the system sits behind the scenes. It's constantly looking to see what other prices are out there. We do this for airline, tickets as well. You know, you're allowed to cancel and rebook, airline ticket within the 24 hour void window from when you make the reservation. And if a traveler booked something that you can find better prices on based on what our technology is able to accomplish, you can rebook to that as well. And so, ultimately, this is a, a feature that can exist as part of your travel program. If you're working with a travel management company, this is either something that they offer or they'll offer our tool, as a tool to be able to take advantage of this and generate reshopping. Now what's important to know about what we do differently than what you may get for your travel agency is that we go much deeper into it. You'll have an account executive working with you to help you identify issues. Let's say there's, you know, new coverage going into into 3 cities that that you have, you know, deals that you didn't take advantage of. You know, what's the incremental savings? How much can you save from that? Let's say your chain wide discount with Hilton isn't as working as well as it should. Yeah. We can find those opportunities and sit down with you and and and help you be able to action these opportunities to generate more savings for your program. But don't take our word for it. Our customers are really excited about this tool and and, you know, Emburse ReShop, which, you know, formerly known as Tripam, was the, or is the predominant, solution for for ReShop in the marketplace. We invented the tool, and a lot of people have replicated us since. What our customer at Aon likes to say is that it gave us the the power to optimize the travel program. We're able to do this on a fully automated solution, capturing savings, identify out of program spend, and giving them visibility so they can, you know, better perform and make sure their negotiating rates were were generally generating what they're looking for. One thing that we have heard a lot from our customers is the power of the analytics that that are are able to generate and and makes decisions for, for our customers. Let me show you what I'm talking about. Your reshop program should be able to tell you things like how well is it working. You know, this is an example of one of the screens you'll get for being an Enbridge reshop customer. You'll see how many offers are generated, how many of those offers were rebooked, and how much savings did you generate from that. This is an example of a screen that you'll see from hotel, but also for air. And the idea here is if your reshop program is not showing you how well it's working and where the opportunities are and where it may do a better job, then you're not really getting the full picture. That's important to see. But once you start collecting information like this is, what my travelers are paying, this is what the retail price would have been, this is what my negotiated looks like, you can start to do some really amazing benchmarking. And what we're able to show you is, you know, what is the savings you're generating as a as a part of you know, relative to the retail price? So, like, if if you didn't exist and you weren't managing your travel program, what would savings look like relative to the retail price? In this sample customer example, it's 25%. But then we don't just look at your negotiated hotel room rates. We also look at all the rates that you have. Where are you booking where you don't have negotiated deals? Where are you booking where you have chain wide or dynamic discounts? And then we're able to help you take a look at what this looks like compared to other programs to be able to say, you know, I'm getting 80% of my, coverage with, negotiated discounts. How are other customers doing? Am I doing better or worse than the benchmark? Then we have a whole bunch of screenshots or or, slides behind this to be able to understand what are your preferred programs looking like, what are your chainwides looking like. If I wanna add a hotel to my program, what's the right price for that particular marketplace? I wanna look at things like what's the highest price I should ever pay in this particular market like San Francisco. You can get that information in there as well. But the idea here is within Hotel Intelligence, this is where the power of reshop comes to life, and you're able to really use this information to be able to, you know, make better decisions and and and and inform leadership on why we should stay at this hotel or not stay at that hotel. And then we have a similar program on the air side as well as you can start to look at air routes and say, you know, if it looks like I'm gonna skip over to this one over here. You know, what are the trends in my booking rates looking like? You know, what are, what are things looking like over time? If I wanna take a look at an analysis to what's the right day of an advanced purchase that I should be making relative to where the prices look like, you know, in each cabin class? What would that look like? And the idea here is you can start to be able to use data to inform your traveler population what it is the right decision is that they should be making. Now another thing we also have is the idea of contract audit. Contract audit is the ability to say, okay. I've negotiated all these deals at all these hotels or all these, routes. Am I actually getting when I negotiated? You can see on the left side of the screen, I've I've got 90% of my deals are covered, but I've only got that discount 87% of the time. And so just because my suppliers have not honored the agreements they've given me or my agency is not loading the prices at the at the as I should have, I've lost out on $4,000,000 in in in savings. And with that, you can start to drill into things like on a per hotel basis, you know, which hotels are giving me the LRA prices that I've negotiated and which ones are not. And that way you can go even further down to the traveler level to be able to say, okay. You know, if I want to sit down and have a conversation with that Sheraton Hanoi, I wanna know why am I only getting my, negotiated price 25% of the time. It certainly makes for a very, interesting conversation with the supplier to be able to say, listen. I did all this work to negotiate a price with you. How come you're giving me that price? And at the end of the day, this is the kind of information you can only really get from Enverse reshop because Enverse Analytics has has got this information in an easy to digest, version so that you can make these decisions and ultimately better manage your travel program. I've got another one I wanna show you also, which has to do with NDC. One thing we did through the NDC time was to be able to take a look at, what are fares going through the NDC channel relative to the Edifact channel, and we've got a dashboard to be able to help you understand that as well. And so one thing that we hear a lot from our customers is the idea of, okay. I get the reshop. I get that for free from my TMC. Why should I, you know, pay to to work with Empress reshop? What we say is, you know, certainly, we work in a way where we are not biased by any kinds of commissions or or rebates. We are we focus solely on what's gonna generate value for the travel manager, but we also give you a lot of really fabulous analytics to be able to make better decisions that you generally can't get unless you hire a consultant or you go through your agency. And and even the agencies don't provide this level of analysis so that, ultimately, when you wanna make better decisions like either changing agencies or changing carriers or or in turn to a new agreement with a new hotel in a new marketplace, we give you all the tools that you'll need to be able to do all that stuff. And this is something as part of your EMBERCE, reshot program. I am at the end of my prepared content, but we got plenty of time for questions, and I am ready to take them. Let's see. We have one question about, can you give some more examples of how companies have used them burst, reshape in the past to reduce their travel budgets? Absolutely. Let's see. 1 of our more avant garde customers who spends a lot of money in travel has, used a function we call clustering, which has to do with the idea of when a traveler books, a hotel, it also shops other hotels in that marketplace within parameters decided by the customer, and they use it to keep people under a certain rate cap. So let's say they decided in New York City, they don't wanna pay more than $350 a night. So every time somebody makes a reservation more than $350 a night, the technology comes into play, takes a look at other hotels that are same quality, same chain, you know, whatever that's important to the traveler that are less than 3.50 within that particular marketplace, and they're able to, save 1,000,000 of dollars. Another example of a customer that uses, some of this is is they use it when they're sitting down with their suppliers for quarterly business reviews, and the supplier is always looking for things like, how do I get more of your market share? Well, they take the contract audit dashboard and the hotel intelligence dashboard and sit down and say, okay. I understand you want more of my market share. I'd like you to explain to me why I'm not getting my my value at these particular properties. If you would like me to give you something, I would like something in return. This way, they can also see, you know, hey. It looks like I'm overpaying relative to the benchmark in this marketplace. I will add this hotel to my program, but you've gotta give me a better deal at this hotel. And the idea here is that they are able to use the data in in more strategic ways to not just sit there and be, you know, told what to do by the suppliers, but also be able to come back to the table with some solutions and, and be able to to fix that. Let's see. I'm being asked for one more example of a an of a customer that's done this stuff well. I know that a customer let's see here. One other customer used this information to be able to calculate how much they were overspending, as as a result of the points. So for example, we know that, you know, some chains are more expensive than others for the same quality product. And what they did was they were able to take analysis to their CFO and say, okay. Because of our allegiance to this chain versus that chain, we're spending a premium of this much money. Now as a result, if I calculate the amount of points that my my our travelers are getting as a result of it, here's how many Disney World vacations we're paying for, as a result of letting our travelers stay at more expensive chains. And so the idea here is, you know, if you've got any kind of analysis background and and you're interested in being able to run the numbers and all kinds of stuff, we've got a lot of the background to be able to do this kind of stuff. Now from the reshop set itself, you know, a lot we have one customer who doesn't wanna change anything at all. They wanna make sure that they get the same price at the same hotel in the same room every time, because they're very focused on making sure the travelers aren't disrupted at all. Another one does tells the travelers right up front, you can book whatever you want. I'm going to put you wherever I feel like it, and that's gotta do with the fact the reshop technology is able to find better deals at other hotels and able to say, okay. This is where you're staying when you come to this marketplace. Yeah. And we have another question here from Julie. She is asking, and this will work with our current travel company. Do they need to incorporate any software? No. I think what you need to do is, well, obviously, talk to your Emburse sales representative about getting, Emburse reshop set up. But in terms of the implementation process, we work with, almost every single travel agency out there. And what we need to do is is have you sign a DRA, which is the data access agreement. And then, ultimately, that gives, EMBERCE permission to collect your reservations coming from your travel agency, and then we're able to enter that into the, the reshop process and certainly work with you on the configuration of that. But then you'll have access to the dashboard. You'll have access to the intelligence of the benchmarking, and then, you'll also get a travel. So you'll get a, a an account executive with travel experience to be able to help you kinda navigate it as you get started. And we have another question. Does Imbursary shop work across all airlines and hotel chains? And how does it, handle preferred vendors and negotiated rates? It absolutely works with every hotel chain globally, because we don't work with the chain. We work with the agency that provides the bookings to us. And so we collect information from all the hotels that we're able to collect. Sorry. We collect the information from all the hotels to be able to tell us what the bookings are, and we're able to shop through many channels to find out what better deals are. When it comes to airlines, I'm not as familiar with the airlines, but I can tell you we certainly work with many US domestic ones and and are able to, you know, set up agreements using what you have there. Yeah. That was about keeping the re reshop savings. That was the quest question was, does the Enbursed keep a portion of the reshop savings? No. We do not. No. You know, we do have an agreement where we you pay us per transaction, or a subscription for a series of transactions ultimately. And then what you're able to do is, once you're within a kind of a a tier of pricing, you know, all the savings go to you. The idea is that, you know, we just use the technology to find them, and it's up to up to you to determine to what extent you wanna take advantage of them depending on how aggressive you wanna configure your system. Yeah. Thank you, Tammy, for that question. We got another question from Linda. What safeguards are in place to ensure rebookings comply with our travel policies? Well, depends upon the way you configure. So, for example, one customer doesn't care about being in preferred programs versus not, so they they can reshop anywhere they want to. All those are very insistent on making sure that any traveler that books outside the policy is reshopped back into the policy. So it it's really depending upon how how aggressive you wanna get. It kinda looks like if you're gonna if you use the, the savings slider and and push it all the way to the right, you can certainly, tell travelers whatever you want, make them do whatever you want them to. If you wanna push the slider the sliders to the left and and more towards the traveler experience experience, you you take advantage of making sure travelers get what exactly what they want, but you do leave some savings on the table. Are there any other takeaways you'd like to include, David? Sure. One thing I think is really important as you consider incorporating Enbridge ReShop into your program is to what extent do you have a managed travel program with a travel agency. You need to be able to centralize where your bookings are coming from. To what extent is that agency either have their own solution or is willing to work with our solution. And then I think when you're ready and you got your homework done, you sit down with your Amverse, consultant who'll able to help you understand to what extent we can get this thing turned on at your program. The idea here is, you know, it it it's very easy to set up. It's very easy to turn on. Now as you can see, it it's as aggressive and as as, beneficial to your program as you want it to be. The technology that that we've developed exclusively for travel and, we, you know, are are designed to ultimately, you know, save our our customers money so that, you know, when they're doing expenses, they're not just, you know, passing off and paying people back for money they spent, but we're actually able to influence the cost of travel from the time that they, made the reservation to the time that, they're they're expensing. And let's see. We got a question here from Will. Are there specific travel policies or conditions, where Imbursed Reshop is most effective? So, like, frequent last minute bookings, high volume travel schedule, things like that. Not particularly any specific. It's designed for all travel, basically. So, you know, if you have a program that everyone's traveling and and they're really making reservations and they're going the next day, this doesn't take it doesn't value as as much because at the end of the day, we don't find as many savings when you when you made a reservation on Tuesday and traveled on Wednesday. We can reshop up to the point of cancellation, and most cancellation policies are 24 to 48 hours. And so at the end of the day, if you are traveling and and making reservations within, you know, normally 2 to 3 weeks before travel, we're able to be very effective in finding savings for your program. And can you talk more about how ReShop works with their current travel management company? Sure. So, essentially, what you would do is you, speak to your well, you speak to us first and we'll help you, you know, ask the right questions. But at the end of the day, what you would do is you go to your travel agency. You ask them to, set up data sharing so that, ultimately, your reservations are sent over to our environment so that we can set up reshop. And then at that once it's done, it's done. You know? It really is about working with your account executive on making sure that the program's optimized for your use. Obviously, train up on how to use the dashboards, and then you are good to go. End of the day, it's your data, so the travel agencies should be pretty amenable to be able to work with, with us on that. We have a lot of experience doing it. We we've got, 50 of the BTN, top 100 working on this. You know, 1,000,000 of dollars going through our environment, 1,000,000,000 of dollars in savings a year. So not a year, over the course of years. But we've, you know, been very effective at, you know, setting the standard for making sure that you're taking advantage of technology to operate your program to save money. And how are how would your team be notified of rebookings or cost savings? Is there a way to track it over time? How's that find out about it? They would use these dashboards. So, ultimately, you know, they can there there's tabs behind there to see, you know, not just here's the summary stats, but also what, you know, which, you know, which travelers are taking advantage of opportunities, which marketplaces are you getting more savings at, which hotels are generally priced higher than others you're able to find savings more frequently. Ultimately, all of this together is is kind of your dashboard to be able to find savings as you go through. Do we have any more questions out there? Because that's the last bit that I have for now. David, any other takeaways you'd like to leave us with? If this is something interesting to you, please reach out to your, associate to get more information. Happy to do demonstrations. In some cases, we can do pilots where we can show you what the savings look like, before actually setting it up. Ultimately, this is a great tool, and one thing we heard traditionally from a lot of customers is there's no reason you shouldn't have selling this as part of your program because, you know, the the return on investment is is is usually amazing. And, you know, you may as well do this because this is this is technology that's been out there for for a little while now. Yeah. Everyone, thank you very much for attending today's webinar. Don't forget to check out the documents tab, and you can download some information about inverse reshop and inverse travel programs in general. If you have any additional questions or would like to schedule a meeting with someone from sales team, you can click that request to follow-up button at the top. There we will be sending out a recording in about 24 hours or so, and I will also probably have some more content that you will receive over the next couple of weeks. Thank you again for joining today. Have a great rest of your day. Thank you.