They say there’s no place like home. But if you’ve ever rolled into a spotless hotel room after a day of exhausting travel and endless meetings, you might disagree. 400-thread-count sheets? Hello Emerald City!

And while it’s important that travelers are comfortable, it’s also important to get the best price for the room, every time.

The first step, of course, is negotiating the best rate (check out our blog on the Top 5 Considerations to Save on Hotel Costs). An experienced Consulting Services department can help with that. Then, you need to make sure the rate you negotiated is what your travelers are booking.

There is the issue of hotel leakage or traveler choice – depending on how lax your travel policy is, it’s possible your travelers book out of program. (Not to digress, but consider configuring your OBT to prioritize or indicate your preferred suppliers. And, show your travelers how Integrated Itineraries work on WorldMobile™ - they can insert an out-of-program booking into their mobile itinerary for easy access to all the information there.)

"You take the time to negotiate these rates; you want travelers to get the rates you've negotiated!"

But a more frustrating and pervasive problem is when your negotiated suppliers, for some reason, don’t provide you rooms at the rate you negotiated.

Yes, you signed a contract. Yes, you agreed to a specific rate.

But yes, sometimes you’ll get charged a non-negotiated rate. And yes, sometimes it’s just because someone wasn’t keeping an eye on it.

It’s imperative that, in addition to skilled rate negotiations, you take advantage of your TMC’s services to audit your hotel rates.

Periodically, hotel booking systems will close out a room type (perhaps in a high-volume time), and so the rate won’t be available. Sometimes something as benign as human error or an un-updated database could be the cause of the discrepancy. That’s why World Travel, Inc. has WorldQC™ processes to audit all your preferred rates. If your preferred property should be booked at $119 a night and they charge you $129, WorldQC™ will trigger a notification to your agent. The agent can then call the property and ask for the correct rate.

Whether your negotiated property list is five hotels long, or 500, all those rates are loaded into our WorldQC™ system so that we know what price you should be paying, every time. Even when the rates mysteriously fall out of the GDS (which has been known to happen), WorldQC™ keeps track and provides consistent hotel rate auditing.

As Kelly Wagner, Director of Consulting Services, says, “You take the time to negotiate these rates; you want travelers to get the rates you’ve negotiated!”

It’s just one more way World Travel, Inc. uses integrated technologies and old-fashioned customer service to make travel simple for our clients.

 

image via Unsplash via Nik Lanus
Chesley Turner

Written by Chesley Turner