Creative Lodging Solutions (No. 52), as its name indicates, concentrates on accommodations. The company assists its corporate clients with lodging expense control, travel policy adherence and consolidated billing and offers negotiated rates for hotel reservations and corporate housing.
CEO Michael Tetterton said the focus comes out of his own experience as a hotel executive with Marriott and as an owner of hotels.
"We had a company called Home-Towne Suites, and because of a billing issue with one of our corporate accounts we saw a solution for corporate bookings of hotels," he said. "We became the Lodging Connection and began helping companies work on their hotel payments."
The Lodging Connection became Creative Lodging Solutions, CLS for short, in 2002.
Tetterton said CLS is "not your typical TMC."
"We do hotels, and we do them well," he said. "We offer rates 20% below what you will find in a GDS, because we know how to leverage our volume. Typically, our clients do $250,000 in lodging or above. The average client we signed last year does about $700,000."
Tabatha Conway, CLS' marketing director, said that clients appreciate CLS' billing services: It audits their invoices and corrects errors before presenting them with a consolidated bill that is coded to their specifications.
But despite its success in specializing, Tetterton said that CLS' business model is evolving toward a full-service operation.
"Toward the end of this year we will bring in air and car, because clients are really demanding it," he said. "Our secret sauce is that other TMCs have GDS rates to offer period, end of discussion. Consortia will have rates within 2% of one another. I will now be able to walk into a room and say, 'I can do air and car for the same rate as my competitors but can get you 20% off the best available rate on hotels.'"
There are talks about changing the company name. But lodging services will still be available on an a la carte basis, Tetterton said.
Other changes are in store, he said. "I think we also have a handle on alternative lodging. We are doing a lot of Airbnb and even tiny houses and houseboats."