BCD rebooks your room when it finds it cheaper

BCD Travel re-shops rooms after they're booked and rebooks them at a lower rate, keeps the price history for the next negotiation, and says the guest's folio and the next trip are coming into view too

by Markus Busch

A room booked through BCD Travel isn't finished when you send the confirmation. BCD's own product page says that every reservation made "via any BCD channel" keeps being checked for a better rate at the same hotel. When the system finds one, it rebooks the room automatically, and the traveler receives an updated itinerary with a new confirmation number. BCD calls it a standard offering now, and says it will soon run in every country where BCD operates its own offices rather than working through a partner agency.

BCD is one of the two agencies at the top of corporate travel. When the UK competition regulator reviewed American Express Global Business Travel's purchase of CWT, it found that BCD and Amex GBT lead the market by a wide margin. Some of your corporate accounts' travelers book through BCD.

A lower rate means a new confirmation number

BCD described the mechanics when it made the service standard in 2018. The system watches the price of a booked room between the day it is booked and the end of its cancellation window. If the rate drops in that time, the original reservation is cancelled and the same room is booked again at the lower price. BCD says more than 99% of these rebookings are like for like, matched on what the guest actually gets: breakfast, cancellation terms, parking.

At the front desk it looks like two ordinary events. A cancellation, then a new booking for the same guest, the same dates and the same room type, at a lower rate. Nothing on either reservation says why it happened.

BCD published its own results at the 2018 launch. The system found a lower rate on up to 8% of bookings, at an average saving of $50 each. Those are BCD's own figures, eight years old, with nothing newer published. On a share of the corporate rooms you have already sold, the price can still move after the sale, and the system acts only when it moves down.

The price history goes to the renewal

The rebook is only half of it. BCD's marketplace lists TRIPBAM, a service that searches booked hotel reservations for lower rates every day and rebooks them when a cheaper option matches the client's rules. The same listing says the daily history helps the client manage its hotel program during the year and negotiate when it comes up for renewal.

Every time one of your booked rooms is re-shopped, the result is kept. When your corporate account sits down for next year's RFP, it can arrive knowing how often your rate dropped after its travelers booked, and by how much. Earlier coverage of TRIPBAM, from 2019, described it checking nearby hotels as well as the one the traveler booked. So the history can include your competitors' rates on the same nights.

You have never seen that file. Your account has.

The folio is next

In August, BCD expanded its partnership with Emburse, an expense management company. Yannis Karmis, BCD's executive vice president of product planning and development, explained what that adds in an interview with Business Travel News published on October 9. As a travel agency, BCD knows which flights and hotels were booked. Emburse's data adds what happened during the stay, which Karmis described as "hotel room service, coffee and rideshares ordered during the stay," so the client sees the total cost of the trip.

For a hotel, that means the corporate client can set your negotiated rate next to everything else on the folio: breakfast at your price, parking, the room service tray at eleven at night. A hotel that won the RFP on rate can be judged on the whole bill.

BCD's own announcement on August 3 said availability will be announced in the coming months. The strategy is on the record. The product date is not.

The next trip and the next review

Two smaller changes point the same way. In the new version of Tripsource, BCD's traveler app, people who book for others can share, copy and reload trips, a convenience BCD pitches at travelers who keep going back to the same place. For the hotel on that trip, the next stay can be booked without anyone searching again. Being on the last trip starts to matter more than ranking well in the next search.

The second is analysis. Tripsource Insights, BCD's analytics tool, already pulls together bookings, card payments, call-center contacts and what travelers searched for in Tripsource. General rollout is planned for the end of this quarter. BCD says an AI Analyst will follow in the coming weeks that recommends actions, including switching suppliers, and models how much the client would save. The example BCD gave was airline policy, not hotels.

What BCD doesn't say

BCD does not say which rates price assurance compares. Your own public rate, an online travel agency's rate for the same room or an aggregator's rate: the answer decides whether the rebook is set off by your own pricing or by someone else selling your room. BCD's product page names no technology partner, so whether TRIPBAM runs it today is not established. The Emburse link and the AI Analyst are announced, not live. And the only performance figures are BCD's own, from 2018.

BCD's answer to Amex GBT is one app that sees the whole trip

Karmis described where this is going in the same interview. He wants Tripsource to work like a banking app: one website, one app, and most of what a traveler or a company needs done inside it, from the booking and the change to the last invoice. The competitive reason sits in the same report. Amex GBT, BCD's main rival, sells an integrated travel-and-expense offering with SAP Concur. The Emburse link is BCD's version.

Every feature in this piece serves one customer, the company paying for the trip. What BCD sells that company is savings it can show. Price assurance shows them on the rate, with a monthly report of potential and realized savings. The shopping history shows them at the renewal. The folio data will show them on the whole bill. Each one leaves a record about your hotel that the buyer reads and you don't.

For a hotel, the corporate rate stops being a number agreed once a year. It gets checked all year: whether it held after the booking, what the stay cost on top of it, whether the traveler came back.

A rate you cut on Thursday to fill Friday can also reach the rooms BCD's travelers already booked for Friday.

Read also: The corporate booking tool found your hotel. An AI decided which version to show.

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