Corporate travel tools: agencies, airlines add value with technology.

• Author: West, Gail
• Position: SPECIAL SECTION: Conventions, Meetings & Corporate Travel

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In the world of business travel, the pendulum is swinging back again. Corporations are migrating away from unstructured travel programs so they can track their employees' travel better and recapture unused tickets to help their bottom lines. There are competing tools to help them do that, and businesses can thank advanced technology for those tools.

Alyeska Pipeline Service Co., a 42-year-old, 800-employee-strong organization, sends its people to a variety of remote and not-so-remote sites along the pipeline's route from Prudhoe Bay to Valdez on a regular basis. They can make their reservations in several ways. Among their choices: use their contracted travel agent, use their travel agent's online reservation tools or use Alaska Airlines' online reservation tool.

"Our employees have to follow company procedures, but they arrange their own travel," says Lisa Booth, assistant systems performance manager for Alyeska.

The same holds true for employees who travel outside the state, Booth says. They'll go to meet with contractors who may be anywhere in the country--even out of the country. They may also travel to attend conferences or go to Washington, D.C., for regulatory meetings. "There are a small handful of Alyeska employees who travel overseas," Booth says. "Currently, most are going to Italy. US-Travel generally arranges those trips for us."

To arrange travel, whether it is by air or car, or a hotel stay, Alyeska's employees can choose to step into the electronic age and use the Internet or they can use the old-fashioned, more personal method of making a phone call to a travel agent.

"We're using technology more and more to track our whole trips," says Katie Pesznecker, Alyeska's community and public relations manager. "Sometimes I like the convenience of calling the travel agent, but either way we get the complete travel package, the airline reservations, the rental car, the hotel--it's all in one package."

Alyeska nixes travel arranged through online agents such as Orbitz or Travelocity, according to Booth. "We can't track our unused tickets through those sites. We can't track matching miles or those kinds of things, so we don't use them," she says.

A Growing Travel Agency

USTravel Senior Vice President for Business Development Mary Gasperlin says the company has grown since its birth in Anchorage in the 1950s. Today, USTravel has about 170 employees nationwide in six Alaska offices as well as offices in Seattle...