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NBTA prepares to make major changes to '05 hotel RFP. (Special Report: Corporate Hotel Programs).

Article Excerpt
While the National Business Travel Association's hotel committee is making only minor adjustments to its electronic hotel request for proposals format for the 2004 bid season, it is planning a more sweeping overhaul for 2005, including changes requiring reprogramming. The hotel committee, which expects to announce its 2005 plans next month at NBTA's annual convention in Dallas, intends to issue the early warning to alert travel managers, as well as hoteliers and third-party providers, that they will need to budget accordingly for next year.

A key change to the RFP entails the use of geo coding to more closely match the location of a hotel in relation to a company's offices in a given destination. In light of the importance of the proximity of a hotel to company offices, this question also is being moved from the RFP's "geography and transportation" module to the core pricing module.

"For the 2004 season, we kept the changes to a minimum, basically just redefining some questions to clarify further what we were asking," said committee chairman Beth Caligiuri, who serves as a strategic procurement manager at The Coca-Cola Co. "Part of the rationale was that we didn't want to adjust the format in a way that would require reprogramming so soon after launching the current format in 2002."

While the changes for 2005 are extensive, they do not alter the modular approach first adopted for 2002. "Buyer acceptance has been high overall, with the number who are using the standard growing each year," Caligiuri said....