Back to the Farm

Farm Life Part 1: It Ain't Norman Rockwell

The mere mention of the family farm is enough to conjure up the image of a Norman Rockwell illustration -- a rosy-cheeked brood huddled around a blazing hearth, celebrating the virtues of togetherness and hard work. Indeed, Rosenbluth built much of its 1980s reputation on just such a warm-and-fuzzy management style. From the beginning, a single core value has eclipsed all others: Treat your employees well, and everything else will fall into place. In fact, Rosenbluth doesn't even use the condescending term "employee" -- everyone in the company is an "associate"; a manager is called a "leader."

But for all the emphasis on the soft stuff, Hal Rosenbluth has consistently been willing to bet the farm on a much tougher and dicier competitive element: advanced information technology. After all, when you're up against giants like American Express and Carlson Wagonlit Travel -- or the emerging self-service possibilities offered by booking travel through the Web -- cutting-edge information technology makes all the difference.

The family farm goes high-tech

The travel service business today is all about costs: demonstrating to your clients that you can help them control theirs, while doing everything you can internally to control yours. The key is efficiency, and Rosenbluth's unrelenting focus on technology creates efficiency in all kinds of ways, large and small.

Overall, technology is the tie that binds clients, reservation agents, sales reps, and top management. It's a lesson that Rosenbluth learned on another North Dakota visit, when his farmer buddy was running behind schedule. "When you need something, go to your neighbor," Rosenbluth says. "It doesn't cost you anything. It's just that you better go running when your neighbor calls for some help."

The Rosenbluth equivalent is its Global Distribution Network, which links every reservation agent at its 100-plus business units to AS400 mini-mainframes in Philadelphia which bulge with client-specific information. That means that any Rosenbluth agent anywhere in the world can draw on every client's global travel data -- or offer service to any client.

All of this is integrated with two proprietary Rosenbluth programs. One is called Res-Monitor, the travel-industry equivalent of a low-fare search engine. Linked up with fare information coming from all the major airlines, it finds the lowest rates at the moment of the client's request -- and then keeps looking for new, better deals up to the moment of departure. A second, more supple system, known as DACODA, takes into account a wide array of other criteria to help a client select not only the lowest fare, but also the best trip. It finds these options based on client data, from companies' individual travel compliance rules to special deals a given client may have with specific carriers. The system also quantifies a range of hard-to-measure qualitative factors -- the pitch of a seat, flying time, or time spent making ground connections. "The software's formulas do those calculations," says Diane Peters, a longtime Rosenbluth executive, now a consultant with the company. "That's totally unique in our industry."

By building this network, Rosenbluth has diminished the importance of the physical location of its agents. Back in the 1980s, it was the first agency to take advantage of its technology to create a massive reservation "nerve center," where agents in a single location handled travel management for clients all over the country. That kept costs down; but as the company grew, Rosenbluth realized that similar "IntelliCenters" could be dispersed anywhere around the country. Now the company has major phone banks in areas where labor costs are low and the work ethic is high: North Dakota, Delaware, and Allentown, PA. Because of these lower costs, a client can save 30% to 40% per ticket by booking through an IntelliCenter, estimates Sales Vice President Joe Terrion.

The Rosenbluth network not only links all of its agents to each other, it also monitors them from the Network Operations Center on the fifth floor of Philadelphia headquarters. Staffed by a couple of associates who divide their attention between seven computers and a grid of nine video monitors, this screen-lit electronic tracking center provides a window on all the farms. With a few clicks, the staffers can check out any Rosenbluth reservation center: how many calls are coming in, how long clients are waiting on hold, how long each call lasts.

The center also acts as an early warning system for unanticipated developments that could cause a sudden spike in one area's call volume or disrupt travel altogether. CNN or The Weather Channel shine out from the center screen, and information about airport conditions and major events in cities all over the world scrolls down other screens. If one farm gets hit with a flood of calls -- or an actual flood -- calls are seamlessly transferred to another center. During the Blizzard of '96, for example, some 21,000 calls to East Coast Rosenbluth outlets were seamlessly rerouted this way.