Carlson Wagonlit Travel Introduces Nego Fares

Neeti Chopra - New Delhi

Praveen Gandhi

In line with the initiatives taken by Carlson Wagonlit Travel (CWT) to provide optimum value for money to its corporate clientele, the company has recently introduced a new concept in India called Nego Fares. Among various other initiatives, the company is also looking forward to open an office in Kolkata by March 2005.

To start with, the company has launched Nego Fares in northern India but has plans to launch it across all offices in the country by early 2005. The company has added a fare loading desk to capture the market fares of different airlines at any given point of time besides capturing negotiated fares of specific corporates and published fares of the airlines. This will enable a travel consultant either in the back office or corporate office to view all the fares together as soon as he gets any booking and thereby provide the cheapest fare to client.

Says Praveen Gandhi, chief executive officer - India, Carlson Wagonlit Travel, "Airlines come out with market fares every now and then. During the lean period, the fares that are brought out are much cheaper than the DGCA fares. On the other hand, customers feel that they can get cheaper value ticket from a smaller travel agent as compared to the value they get at CWT. Moreover, at times our consultants tend to miss out on he fares available in the market because of the manual process. To overcome such quandaries, we felt that there was a need to bring in transparency in the system. Through this method, the customer benefits in terms of cost savings and the company gains in terms of product enhancement."

No other company in India has yet introduced this concept. Nego Fares can be described as phase II of the Business Process Reengineering (BPR) exercise that was initiated 18 months back by the company. BPR has brought the company's front office reservation system at par with all Asia Pacific countries. Explains Gandhi, "It is a totally automated and continuous process. Whenever a booking comes up the travel consultant is supposed to fill up the automated scripts, which are available for air booking, foreign exchange, in fact, for the entire range of services provided by the company. Along with this, profile management of the travellers is an important process that has been initiated by us. Today, we have profiles of more than 30,000 frequent travellers. Because of this, the meal request of the person, validity of his visa, credit card numbers, frequent flyer numbers, etc are all available on the systems."

According to Gandhi, corporate travellers will derive a lot of value from the Nego Fares. Whatever is appearing on the PNR or on the ticket, straightaway goes on to the MIS web. All manual processes have been eliminated. Therefore, the errors in terms of providing the lowest possible fare to the customer that used to happen due to manual intervention have been totally eliminated. The customer gets the feel that they are dealing with a global company and same processes are being followed everywhere.

Elucidating on how Carlson Wagonlit Travel has been able to consolidate its position in the market, Gandhi says, "Being a part of a global company, the reach and network has helped us a lot. The best practices that we follow from our global offices and the ground level services that we provide our customers kept us going in the market. We try to understand the expectations of our clients from our end and try to deliver on that." The company has witnessed a growth of about 28 per cent increase in top line over last year. By the end of this fiscal year in March, Gandhi is optimistic of achieving a growth of 30 per cent plus. The reason being the company has signed some very large accounts including Satyam, Phillips India, etc.