Questions About Hotel Commission Recovery

 


 

My company currently reconciles and posts hotel commissions, and sends invoices to all properties that are delinquent. Why should I contract an outsource recovery group to supplement my own successful efforts?

1. Even the best internal agency programs result in numerous hotel records which remain unreconciled, allowing legitimate hotel revenue to remain unpaid. It is likely that your agency dunning program limits the number of notices sent to each non-responsive hotel to prevent recurrent costs from outrunning the potential commission yield.

2. By passing all remaining unreconciled records on to Commtrak, supplemental statements will be generated which will result in additional revenue yield. As a professional third party advocate, hotels recognize that our involvement represents a far more serious step in the reconciliation process. Many will respond to Commtrak in situations where the agency is ignored.

3. Commtrak will repeat the invoice process to each delinquent property until we receive a satisfactory response. This is cost-efficient for us simply because each dunning notice reflects our entire client base, not just the records from an individual agency. In addition, the aggregate power of this type of notice leads to greater responsiveness on the part of the hotel accounting staff.

4. The agency pays no direct fee for this service. Commtrak simply shares equally in commissions collected solely through our own efforts. Comprehensive commission collection reports validate all activity, and accompany each agency payment from Commtrak.

The logic is irrefutable. Commtrak essentially offers the agency a no cost, incremental revenue opportunity.

I currently use the Pegasus ERTS Commission Processing Program for my primary hotel payment consolidation, commission reconciliation, and billing. Why should I consider an additional recovery service with Commtrak?

Pegasus provides a valuable and professional service for travel agencies. They are the major hotel commission reconciliation firm in the travel industry. Like most internal agency reconciliation systems, they also can investigate and invoice unpaid or unresolved records for up to 180 days. After that, most systems find that continued efforts to pursue unresolved items cost more than any additional dollar yield.

Quite simply, Commtrak is the industry's only "collections" firm. Recovering commissions from severely aged records represents our core competency. The vast majority of our customers use either an internal process or a third party such as Pegasus for primary reconciliation and billing. Records that still remain unresolved after 180 days are then forwarded to Commtrak for additional billing and recovery. Our printed documents, mailed to individual hotels, will help to professionally extract every available commission dollar for our customers.

What kind of back office accounting system do I have to have to use your service?

We have clients using all the major CRS/GDS interface accounting systems. We can also help you even if you have a proprietary system.
 

Accounting Systems

Third Party Firms

Agresso

CTS

GlobalWare

Pegasus (ERTS)

Max

 

TRAMS

 

TravCom

 

What kind of information do I need to provide so you can start recovering my unpaid hotel commissions?

The first thing we need is some simple agency information. In most agency accounting systems the reservation information is linked to the booking site by a branch number or ARC/IATA number. By providing COMMTRAK with a file containing that information, we can merge the reservation data with your agency information.  If you agency has multiple locations - we need the same information about all branches. Download complete information recommendations.
 

Reservation Data

The more booking information, the better. The following list contains most information pertaining to a hotel reservation. Some of the items are redundant and not necessary (departure date is not required if you provide arrival date and number of nights). Some agencies assign an internal Hotel Code and maintain their own hotel data files. We will need a copy of that file if you follow that practice. Please do not hesitate to make any additions that can enhance the utility of your data.  Download complete information recommendations.

How do I get the data from my system to your system?

Getting the data from your system to ours is as easy as transferring a file to a protected ftp site or via e-mail. We also need the file structure of your data. This structure can often be found in a data directory in your system.

How do I get the data from TravCom to Commtrak?

Travcom (version 8.1x11 and higher) has an export/import utility for Commtrak built directly into TravCom.  Download the step by step help file.

How do I get the data from GlobalWare to your system?

With the help of some of our customers currently using GlobalWare, we have developed a protocol for getting the data from this system.  We have two different help files depending on the version of GlobalWare you have.
Download either of these files for a step by step procedure for exporting this data.
    GlobalWare Version 3.1
    GlobalWare Version 3.2
This procedure requires Microsoft Access to perform the data export.

A much better (and easier) solution is to use a utility produced by Scofield Management Systems.  Many of our GlobalWare clients claim it pays for itself the first time they use it to reconcile the Commtrak commission payment data.  This program makes it easy to export data from GlobalWare to Commtrak and makes it simple to re-integrate the Commtrak payment data back into the GlobalWare system.  No hand posting!

How do I get the data from TRAMS to Commtrak?

TRAMS users can use our Crystal Report definition to export data to Commtrak.  Click here for details....

Can I send the data from my system to you via e-mail?

If the file size is 2MB or less after using a compression utility such as WinZip or PkZip, e-mail is a great way to transfer files to Commtrak.  You can use the following protocol to prepare and send the file:

  1. Create your data file
  2. Compress the data file using a compression utility such as WinZip or PkZip
  3. Create a cover e-mail message in your e-mail program
  4. Use the e-mail attachment function to "attach" the compressed data file (usually named filename.zip)
  5. Send the e-mail message to

Sending files larger than 2MB is not recommended because of high up-load and down-load times and a greater likelihood of errors occurring during the file transfer.

 

I'm a data processing professional, just tell me what you want and I'll send it...

COMMTRAK accepts all forms of magnetic media for file transfer. We have assembled a few guidelines which will aid in the efficient transfer of data from your system to ours.

Our standard file structure is a .DBF (Data Base File), used by dBase, Rbase and FoxPro. If your system can structure your files in a .DBF structure, this is the best structure for transfer. Files created in Access (*.mdb) or other database programs will also work well.  In addition, data stored in spreadsheet format (Excel, Lotus, etc.) is acceptable. Otherwise, the file should be in a fixed length ASCII (comma, quote) delimited format. This is usually a standard option in most systems. These files can also be compressed using various utilities. You can get an incredible amount of data into a file using these techniques.