It can take important weeks to organize and translate airlines’ negotiated and corporate
contracts into coded data that gets fares into the market.
But automation is here, and what used to take weeks now can take hours.
Learn how United Airlines used Express Contracts to change the game for their sales team, and
discover how your contracts can become bookable fares in minutes.
Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, everyone.
Thank you all for joining us for today's session on contract automation and the ability to
create a touch-free, end-to-end, fully automated workflow for your private programs.
We are so excited to have Glenn Hollister, vice president sales strategy and effectiveness
from United Airlines. He is going to be sharing with us his insights in working with Express
Contracts and the value it has delivered to them,
But first, let's do a quick introduction for Express Contracts.
Some of the key challenges that are being witnessed with the current workflows for contract
management is the long lead time between contract signature and getting the fares in market.
Additionally there are very few subject matter experts available that really, truly understand
the fare filing complexities.
The struggle to efficiently get the contracts met with the renewal deadlines.
All these result in missed revenue opportunities, unintended coding errors, and ultimately impact
your customer relationships.
ATPCO in partnership with Volaro developed Express Contracts to automate the creation,
update, and management of your contract data to ATPCO.
This enables your contracts to be available within market in a matter of hours.
Once integrated, Express Contracts requires minimal fare filing expertise.
It is available 24/7 across global time zones. And it offers scalability, enabling you to
maximize revenue potential when the market conditions improve.
Express Contracts delivers significant value by remarkably improving the time to market.
It reduces both coding errors and the manual coding costs.
Overall, it helps improve your customer relationships and stay ahead of your competition.
But now we want to hear from you.
On the side of your screen, you will see a small pop-up if you can take a minute and
tell us which of these pain points resonate with you for your private programs.
Thank you for doing that.
So we talked about the speed to market with automation
and what does that look like in numbers.
Well, data shows us that over 90 percent of the contracts filed are within market in two hours.
Now that's incredibly fast, as compared to the weeks and days it takes in the current workflows.
Creating a touch-free workflow got even easier with the Express Contracts API.
This fire-and-forget API can be easily integrated with your existing contract management system
and can let your sales team send the data directly to ATPCO,
and automation takes care of the rest.
For airlines that prefer a more hands-on approach, the standardized spreadsheet is a better suited option.
Express Contracts has continued to evolve over the years and now supports a variety
of programs ranging from corporates to leisures, specialty and more.
The most common categories and record types have been enabled within Express Contracts
and we continue to add more.
Don't know what these are, that's okay.
Express Contracts takes care of the complexities so that your teams can simply update that
information in the contract management system, and automation takes care of the rest.
To recap, Express Contracts delivers significant value by improving speed to market dramatically
and helps you realize your revenues faster.
And now it's time to welcome Glenn Hollister from United Airlines.
Hello, Glenn, and a very warm welcome to you, and thank you for taking the time today to
join us for this session of Elevate 2021.
Well, thank you, Swati, and I’m glad to be here and thank you for the opportunity
to talk with everyone today.
Wonderful.
So let's start with the basics.
Glenn, can you tell us a little bit about your role at United Airlines?
Sure, so my role, I like to describe it as I’m everything B2B that's not a salesperson.
So we have a sales team that calls on primarily corporations and travel agencies, and I’m
responsible for everything that is needed to make them successful.
So that includes our B2B marketing, our products, our pricing team for those products, the service
on those products, the systems behind those products.
In addition, I’m also responsible for the commercialization of our distribution through
all different types of distribution channels.
So that's really what my team does and that kind of leads to why I was interested
in Express Contracts.
Wonderful, sounds like you have your hands full.
So can you share with us what are some of the pain points that you were trying to overcome
that led you to Express Contracts?
Sure, and I think you really hit on the main ones when you were talking about Express Contracts.
So for us, the thing that initially got us interested in Express Contracts was the idea
of really drastically reducing the time from when a contract is signed to when the fare is filed.
That is something that we heard about both from our customers and from our sales team,
that it was taking too long.
Customers were frustrated, they weren't sure,
the sales people would be getting these phone calls or emails like, are the fares there yet,
are they there yet, right?
So that's that was the number one reason.
That really predated the pandemic when we started looking at that issue.
And then through the pandemic the second issue that really came up, you touched on, is just
a lack of experts in this space.
And I have to say that I feel really fortunate here at United that we have a fantastic fare filing team.
Some of the folks that, some of the issues you mentioned around quality and things like
that I've been very fortunate I've not had to deal with those at all.
But unfortunately through the pandemic, like all other parts of our airline, the fare filing
team got a little smaller, which puts more pressure on how do we get access to that expertise
and how do we get to a decent responsiveness to our customers.
And that's something we are seeing across the board, across the industry, that the industry
looks different now, pandemic with the migration or the loss of the expertise.
So that makes sense.
Thank you for sharing that.
Can you walk us through a little bit about how did you approach contract automation?
Sure, so the contract automation, at a very high level, we have, you can think of private
fares as being in a few different areas.
One is corporate, the other’s agency, and you can also look at them, as in the case
of United, as being either domestic or international.
And for those who are familiar with domestic US fare filing,
that has kind of its own set of intricacies and ways of doing
things that are different than the way we file internationally.
Internationally, obviously we have a number of joint venture partners and we have to do things in a very
synchronized way to make sure that the
promise of the joint venture is actually realized when someone goes to buy a ticket.
So we really think of those as kind of our four areas of fare filing,
between agency domestic, or agency corporate, and international and domestic.
So when we started thinking about what we wanted to do,
the first thing that was clear was that we would focus on corporate first.
And that's just because
that's where this real feedback that we were getting on,
if you will, time to market for a new contract, that's where we're really hearing it the loudest.
It's also potentially a somewhat smaller area, at least on a
filing-by-filing basis.
And that's our recommendation as well. Always start with something smaller and then you can scale.
Once you get the simpler standardized contracts through, then it's easier to deal with the more complex one.
So absolutely that makes perfect sense.
You touched upon something that actually I wanted to get into a more strategic question.
You said you started with corporates, and data is pointing to the fact that business
travel is slower coming back as compared to leisure.
So what prompted you to consider an Express Contracts integration at this time, you know,
while things are slow?
Sure, so I think first of all, as I mentioned, we were looking at this before the pandemic
started, but I think in some ways the pandemic actually gave us a window of opportunity,
where we weren't doing a lot of corporate fare filing.
Most of our corporations, when their deals came up, just extended the existing deal which
is obviously really simple fare filing, to extend it.
Right.
So we, the volume of really new stuff we were doing was much lower than normal, and that
gave us kind of a window of opportunity to do things that we ordinarily would not have
had, we would have had to kind of change the tires on the car as it was going down the road.
And here maybe we got to pull the car over on the side of the road at least for a few minutes.
So we'll make that a very quick pit stop and get you back on the road racing very soon.
So that's fantastic, thank you for sharing that.
I'd love to hear more about what has been the feedback that your team has shared with
you once Express Contracts has been integrated, you know, from the users, and any thoughts.
And again, we haven't rolled this out even across all of our corporate yet, we've really
picked just a couple of use cases, but those are use cases that I think are, at least one
of them is quite visible to our sales team, and I think they're thrilled that we're able
to go from waiting those days or weeks that you mentioned to get fares filed
to something that is generally much faster, usually same day.
And that is really a nice win in their hat and they're starting to get to a point where
they feel comfortable telling customers about how fast a contract can be turned on.
Yeah, and I’m sure your customers are happy to hear that contracts can be in market
with a matter of two hours, so that should keep your sales teams also happy.
And lastly, just wanted to get a sense of where do things stand, what does the future
look like for United and Express Contracts?
Any plans or anything you want to share with us?
Sure, so you know when we built out our initial Express Contracts process here, we said what
kind, in addition to the categories, or I mentioned, we really said, well there are different reasons
we fare file and there's really two.
One is there's a new contract, it's either a brand new customer or it's a customer who
signed a very different kind of deal, and then the second is what I might call an incremental
or an ad hoc kind of filing, where maybe we've added a new product in a market and we need
to file for it or we're adding some city pairs to an existing contract.
So when we initially built this, we built this for one product and one specific kind
of incremental filing. And so where we're at right now is understanding how do we expand to the
rest of our products and the rest of our incremental filing use cases.
Wonderful, that makes sense.
Again, start slowly and then expand as you learn more.
So thank you for sharing that.
Lastly, I’m just going to wrap up today's session with a couple of questions that we
get asked about Express Contracts, but before I do that, Glenn, is there anything you want
to share with us before I wrap up?
You know, I would just say that for those who are thinking about, how do I do more with
less, automation I think is in general often part of the answer.
And if you're looking at this part of your business and how do I get things in market
faster, then you should certainly look at Express Contracts as a way to possibly
bring some automation in without having to build everything from the ground up.
Wonderful, thank you for that.
And as I wrap up, I just wanted to address a couple of questions that we keep hearing
frequently with regards to Express Contracts, and so I thought this was a great opportunity
to cover those.
One of the ones we hear most often is what kind of contract management system or CMS
does Express Contracts work with?
Do I have to have a CMS?
To answer the first part, it works with a variety of CMSs.
It works with Prism, Salesforce. If you have a internally developed system as well, it
can be easily hooked up.
If you don't have a contract management system, our partners over at Volaro have just introduced
Fare Hub. That is the first contract management system to be directly integrated with Express Contracts.
So I definitely encourage, if you are considering upgrading your contract management system
or switching it out for a new system, please do consider that.
Our second question we hear most frequently is, being ATPCO, what are the trends that
we are seeing in terms of automation adoption?
And Glenn actually touched upon that. This is actually the time that we are seeing an
increased interest and engagement and investment in automation by airlines across the board,
be it large international carriers or smaller domestic ones.
So as the industry re-emerges, automation is going to continue to play a crucial role in recovery.
So with that, I want to thank you, Glenn, for joining us today and sharing your insights.
We really appreciate you taking your time. And for our audience, if you have more questions,
please feel free to reach out to our regional sales directors.
This session is going to be recorded and going to be made available, and if there are any
other resources that you would like, please feel free to get in touch with us.
Until later, stay safe, be healthy, and be happy.
Thank you.