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Cotter charts Web rate course. (One-on-One).

Article Excerpt
Aware that Web rates often undercut negotiated room rates, Robert Cotter, COO of Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide, last month met with BTN hotel editor Bruce Serlen to address Starwood's overall Internet strategy and how the present economy is shaping buyer decisions.

BTN: How do you respond to travel managers frustrated by Web rates?

Robert Cotter: Negotiated corporate travel eventually will be able to be bought on the Web sites. If you go back to the introduction of the global distribution systems and the ability to put specific negotiated pricing to specific GDS addresses, the situation with the Internet isn't any different, it's just more pervasive. Consequently, we believe we will be contracting for corporate accounts across the Web. Companies will have their own URLs that will contain their negotiated rates and their travelers will be able to access the URL with a password.

We're working right now on the ability to do our contracting in this fashion in the short term, rather than the long term, but understand that travel managers' levels of frustration also change depending on the environment we're in. During recessionary periods, for example, travel managers always have been extremely frustrated by the inability to manage travel expenses because they get a kind of pressure from senior management they don't get when times are more robust. As a result, in times like these there's a lot of pressure for convergence of pricing and ease of booking. At the same time,...

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