Interesting Bedfellows

CASE STUDY

Resicom dispatches our technicians nationwide to perform preventative and emergency maintenance.  As our crews travel extensively throughout the country for project execution, there was a subsequent need to effectively manage our overnight accomodation expenses.  Therefore, Resicom developed a partnership with a hotel chain to keep travel costs low and effectively transfer the savings as decreased quotes to our clients.   

Scope

The scope of work needed to execute this project:

1. Find nationwide hotel chains that had specific amenities that would benefit our traveling crews as well as Reward Point Programs.
2. Gather information about the chains for comparison.
3. Finalize account with selected hotelier that provides significant discounts when numerous stays are reserved.  

Challenges

The challenges of this project included:

1.  Finding a hotelier that met our needs in regards to both locations and amenities available.
2.  Negotiating with the chain for the maximum nightly and length of stay discount while establishing that Resicom would fulfill minimum stay expectations.
3.  Ensuring that the hotel chain management was consistently accommodating and user-friendly, and did not escalate workload for busy home office support booking or modifying travel.  

Solution

Several hotel chains met our criteria, but we needed to ensure we were “getting in bed” with the ideal partner.  We wanted to capitalize the benefits of our extensive travel, while effectively transferring the savings onto our clients to drive down their overall costs.  

Our solution for the project included:

1. Reaching out to several potential hotel chains to compare locations, amenities, discounts, and reward offer programs.
2. Scheduling meetings and establishing correspondence with regional hotel sales representatives to discuss details of such a partnership.
3. Providing target list of frequently visited locations and itemized travel dates to negotiate larger discounts.
4. Creating a program with determined partner whereas 7+ day stays at one location would result in greater percentage discount. 
5. Utilizing the hotelier’s direct bill capability to streamline invoice payments, thus saving time for our home office support staff.
6. Becoming experts with the hotel chain’s online booking engine, increasing efficiency when booking travel for our crews.

Summary

Resicom’s process of using in-house technicians on a national scale provides an exemplary level of accountability and capability.  Resicom’s nationwide presence and consistent workload allowed us to leverage our buying power into a 18% discount on all hotel stays throughout the country.  We were able to capitalize on rewards programs for added benefits of free stays, airlines miles/credits, and gift cards to major home improvement stores.  These benefits and accrued savings allowed us to increase margins, thereby passing said savings to current and future clients.