Chain of Fools
by Ian Sclater
Case study - Credit Suisse
At the beginning of 2006 Credit Suisse
adopted a new travel policy. This included
disposing of the many different vendors
the company had been dealing with for
its serviced apartment needs and
consolidating them with a single supplier.
Ben Varey, Vice President of Corporate
Real Estate and Services in the Global
Travel Department explains: "This enabled
us to pull together our spend to get
better leverage and at the same time
pull together all the different elements
associated with serviced apartments,
such as graduate programmes, relocations
and extended stay."
Credit Suisse mandates the use of serviced
apartments, mainly in London and New
York, for stays of five nights or more and
tends to contract for longer periods with
those providers than with hotels.
Varey says that the way the product is
distributed - whether by GDS or a
different platform - is the big differential
between hotels and serviced apartments.
Credit Suisse set up its own online RPF
form for corporate apartments and built
an intranet-held database into which
bookers, mainly PAs, enter the necessary
search data, including two or three preferred
choices of serviced accommodation. This
generates an email request to their supplier
reservation team, which then responds
with a confirmation direct to the enquirer,
a process which Varey describes as "fairly
seamless for the end user."
The only slight downside from booking a
hotel, Varey points out, is that it is usually
not possible to get instant availability
from a serviced apartment provider, and
responses may take a day or two. This is because serviced apartments have a
more complicated inventory to manage
than hotels, dealing as they do with
blocks of bookings ranging from a few
days to a year. At the same time, he
acknowledges that some corporate
apartment providers do release a small
amount of inventory into GDS.
However, he admits: "With serviced
apartments you do get the opportunity
to view pretty much the full inventory
of product, which is something you can't
do with hundreds of hotels." Credit
Suisse has also undertaken site inspections
of many of their preferred properties.
Serviced apartment procurement, says
Varey, is a different concept from either
an airline or hotel RFP. This especially
impacts on terms and conditions - a very
important part of the negotiation process
- affecting aspects like lead-in time,
cancellation policy and the right to
extend stays. He does agree, however:
"We have a large volume, so we're able
to negotiate better terms."
He says that travellers were at first
sceptical of serviced apartments when
the company first introduced them into
the accommodation programme,
but adds: "Once they saw the product,
we got very few complaints."
Currently, Credit Suisse books around
45,000 serviced apartment nights a year
- about 35 per cent of the London and
New York accommodation total. Varey
expects this ratio to increase slightly as
the company looks to pursue opportunities
in some of the more challenging markets,
such as Dubai and Moscow.
