Carlson Wagonlit

Reliable updates vital for business travellers

Leading business travel company relies on PageOne Messaging to keep clients in the loop.

International business travellers and their employers are keenly aware of the threat of terrorist activity. In response to this threat, one of the UK’s leading business travel companies now relies on PageOne Messaging to keep its clients aware of potential problems. As a global company that organizes business travel for the UK divisions of some of the world’s biggest companies, including Shell, BP and The Royal Bank of Scotland Group, Carlson Wagonlit Travel provides the complete travel package to its clients. “Our clients need to know exactly where their travelling staff are at any one time and, should anything untoward happen, whether any of their employees have been affected,” said Carlson Wagonlit’s Barry Ramsey. “We have a multi-lingual 24-hour Emergency Assistance Unit based at our Heathrow office providing assistance to our customers. This team also monitors news television channels, websites and a direct news feed sourced from Reuters to ensure that we receive important news as it breaks.”

Fast response to events

Once news of a major event breaks, Carlson Wagonlit must tell clients quickly whether their employees are involved. “PageOne Messaging had all the capabilities we wanted,” said Ramsey. “Our biggest challenge is gathering the data to begin with. When registering new clients, we add them to our outbound distribution list. “We ask for two mobile phone numbers and an email address of key contacts within the client organisation. We add this information to a central database and include the mobile numbers on the distribution list. “We have a large amount of data that needs to be managed. PageOne Messaging does this extremely well and the technology is incredibly user-friendly and intuitive, enabling our staff, who are travel consultants, not IT experts, to easily process the information.”

2,000 messages within minutes

For example, when a commercial aircraft went down off the West African coast earlier in 2005, Carlson Wagonlit issued 2,000 messages within minutes, telling clients their staff were not involved. When a client is caught up in an incident, Ramsay’s team needs to edit the distribution list to ensure that everybody receives the appropriate information. “PageOne’s technology gives us the flexibility that we need. If there is a chance that one of our clients was involved in an incident, we obviously can’t include them on the distribution list that receives the generic message. “Using PageOne we can edit the list, remove the contacts of the companies affected and notify the others in the standard generic way. “Our account managers will then, under the guidance of senior management, personally contact the affected company’s travel managers and inform them that there is a possibility that some of their employees may have been involved in the incident.”