Gant Travel, a global travel agency, has successfully incorporated the means to offer a 70% refund on all prepaid hotel rooms purchased by travelers via the incorporation of Roomer’s cancellation protection offering.
Gant’s President / CEO Patrick Linnihan states, “It’s a hotelier’s market right now. Travel managers are working hard to find new ways to drive down hotel costs. Until now, travel managers have had to discourage the use of prepaid hotel rates because of the need for flexibility when schedules change. Gant has teamed up with Roomer to provide the means for travelers to leverage savings from prepaid hotel rates while avoiding most of the risk of losses from using prepaid rates by offering to refund 70% of every prepaid hotel booking in exchange for an additional small amount on the cost of the room. In our initial studies, by smartly using prepaid rates, we are predicting companies can see an additional savings of 5 to 7% over their current hotel spending rate; this is found money.”
“Roomer offers this same protection to our consumer market and it’s been very successful. What we have done is taken a significant portion of the risk of using a prepaid hotel room out of the decision on whether or not to use a lower prepaid rate.” says Roomer’s Managing Director Richie Karaburun.
“This will be a game changer for how corporations view the use of prepaid rooms. Before our innovation of this offering, the corporate traveler and travel manager held a love / hate relationship with the prepaid rate; travelers love the savings, and travel managers hate it when they see money lost from the punitive cancellation policy. Our new offering has eliminated 70% of the risk of using prepaid rooms as a strategy to control hotel costs. Plus since we have rolled out our agency connection on Concur’s TripLink program, we can offer this protection on bookings made anywhere for our TripLink equipped client,” says Linnihan.
The steps to use Gant’s new Asset Recovery Program are simple. First, a travel manager agrees to a small additional fee on all prepaid hotel rooms purchased, then modifies the company’s policy to include prepaid hotel rates; this enables the online booking tool to offer travelers the lower prepaid rates. Prepaid rates are charged at the time of booking by the hotel. When a traveler cancels a prepaid booking, Gant tracks the cancellation and refunds 70% of the charge back to the corporation as long as the traveler canceled 24 hours before the date of Check in.
Behind the scenes, Roomer has created the means to resell the room on a secondary market that it has created new to the travel industry. “We see this program as a valuable way of meeting the needs of a new segment of travelers and as a means of driving more inventory to our core business,” states Karaburun.
