Hotel contract negotiations are a key factor in managing travel program costs, as referenced in a recent Procurement.travel article. The article stated hoteliers and buyers are currently engaged in a challenging set of rate negotiations, with rates possibly rising three to seven percentage points. With so much at stake, TRX has expanded its offering to better equip travel buyers to help them secure the lowest rates possible for their travel program.

TRX Hotel Spend Management offering provides spend management services to travel and procurement managers, helping to identify, quantify, capture, and track travel-related savings. The rigorous, analytically-driven service consists of four steps designed to provide corporations a turnkey offering to manage hotel spend.

• Hotel Strategy – Utilizes clustering, scenario modeling and other proprietary tools to determine true hotel spend by market, brand, property, and spend category.
• Supplier Sourcing – Provides full-service support through the RFP sourcing including supplier communications, benchmarking rates, and negotiated savings analysis.
• Demand and Supply Compliance – Monitors and audits all GDSs ensuring GDS availability and auditing rates are properly loaded and available for purchase.
• Program Performance – Provides data and analysis needed to ensure a hotel program is successfully used. Data can be segmented by property hotel compliance, spend, savings by company, project, and more.

"TRX's Hotel Spend Management and data intelligence offerings are the perfect complement to our supplier sourcing and compliance solutions," said Mike Boult, Chief Commercial Officer for Lanyon. "This offers corporations and agencies with the only automated centralized platform to manage the entire spend category. From strategy to sourcing to compliance to robust reporting and analysis, a corporation can centrally manage their entire category spend."

"TRX understands the negotiating environment is becoming more difficult for travel buyers," said Shane Hammond, President and CEO, TRX. "Our turnkey Hotel Spend Management offering provides travel buyers the tools needed to maximize vendor negotiations and achieve significant savings to the bottom-line through improved compliance, intense scenario modeling, and automated bid logic."

TRX will demonstrate the new Hotel Spend Management services at the GBTA Convention, booth 1495, August 21 – 24 in Denver, CO.