HRS' solution to reshape corporate travel landscape in Asia

SINGAPORE – Hotel Reservation Services (HRS), Europe’s leading managed business travel service provider, has launched Intelligent Sourcing in Asia Pacific as part of its strategic business expansion in the region.

Intelligent Sourcing is an end-to-end consulting service that supports corporate travel and procurement departments in crafting an optimized hotel portfolio through direct cost reduction while respecting quality of accommodation. This is made possible through HRS’ strong analytical foundation, hotel booking expertise, and sourcing strategy via the proprietary tool allowing transparent marketplace benchmarking.

This new service, complementary for strategic corporate clients, comes at a time when global organizations face a growing cost pressure for its corporate travel, while at the same time travel patterns for its employees are getting more complex and diverse than ever.

“With HRS’ expertise accumulated from working with over 35,000 companies worldwide, this launch of the new Intelligent Sourcing solution will reshape the corporate travel landscape in Asia,” said Christian Lukey, Commercial Director APAC, HRS. “This service will help organizations to combine corporate travel excellence and cost efficiencies when sourcing their individual hotel portfolio. Intelligent Sourcing is the key component of HRS’ fully integrated travel solutions.”

Intelligent Sourcing follows a 360-degree approach that benefits large international organizations’ travel management through these key process steps:
• Portfolio analysis (involves consolidation, analysis of booking behaviour, identification of cost savings potential and segmentation of destinations according to booking volumes)
• Concept development (identification of optimal hotel partners and of best processes)
• Bidding and rate negotiation with identified hotel partners
• Rate loading into corporate booking systems
• Controlling and analysis

When clients utilize HRS’ Intelligent Sourcing offering, they will be able to save on manpower, tools, consultation and direct costs through the bundling of booking volumes, and strengthening of negotiation power on top of the obvious reduction of process and indirect costs. Nevertheless, the company ultimately remains in full control over the selection and negotiation of the hotel portfolio.

“With Intelligent Sourcing, HRS has done an excellent job for us. Without their support and expertise in hotel acquisition, such a time-consuming analysis and negotiation would never have been possible. In the end, despite increased business travel volume, we save money,“ said Richard Sebald, Travel Manager of Bearing Point, a multinational management and technology consulting firm headquartered in Amsterdam, Netherlands.
Furthermore, this new service enables a company to have a much clearer picture and understand the travel trends of their employees, providing managers with information to take advantage of market opportunities. With a data-driven system, companies will be able to identify the areas where core businesses are concentrated upon.

Intelligent Sourcing has already gained very positive feedback from its launch customers and hotels in other parts in the world. It completes the travel process and enables HRS to be a full services provider as it combines Sourcing, Search and Book, Payment, Expense and Reporting.

Sourced: TravelDailyNews