IT’S a familiar story: you’ve got travellers booking out of policy, you’re struggling to drive up online adoption, your MI is messy and you suspect you’re not getting the best deals from your suppliers. So who do you turn to in times of need, when management is tightening the belt and your TMC can’t supply all the solutions? Why, a business travel consultant of course. Answering the call to arms of clients large and small, from across all industry sectors, these outsourced category specialists have found themselves in greater demand than ever. While some are employed to simply help cut
travel spend, consultants say their remit is far more diverse, with clients looking at the inefficiencies across their organisation and looking for help in smoothing things out. Chris Pouney of Severnside
Consulting says he has seen a major upturn from clients seeking impartial advice on TMC selection and performance, CSR issues and pre-trip reporting systems, while constructing policy, reducing carbon emissions, better MI and the implementation of new tech- nology are all on the agenda too. Having launched in the autumn
We don’t go in and say everything needs to go,” she says. “It’s our job to buy the right solution for the client. We’re not afraid to get involved with the nitty-gritty and the tough questions before a contract is on the table.” The question that many corporates are rightly concerned with is what return on investment they can achieve. After all, spending money in order to save money might need some justification to convince those signing the cheques. “If MI and a detailed travel profile is available
“The question to ask is not who owns the consultancy – whether they’re a one-man band or TMC-owned – but what is the knowledge and expertise of that consultant”
of 2009, it’s more difficult for Bouda to say whether corporates have upped their interest in consultancies, but the fact the young company has been ‘flat-out busy’ speaks volumes, and not necessarily on cost-cutting projects, as Clare Murphy explains. “We’re about more than saving money. In fact, around 70 per cent of our contracts have been to improve service. Cost savings are an added benefit, but service has been the key driver.” The Corporate Travel Partnership’s Robert Daykin agrees that a consultant’s role is diverse, and that focusing on costs is to risk missing out on other savings opportunities. “There’s more value to be derived from process re-engineering, the elimination of unnecessary travel, and improving traveller behaviour at the point of sale,” he says, “than from doing deals and screwing down the travel agent which seem to be the focus of many organisations.” Claire Rowley, travel category specialist at buyingTeam, says its clients range in size from those with annual travel spend of £500,000 through to multinationals operating programmes in excess of £120million. She says they see some well-managed travel set-ups, but there is normally scope for improvement, and that the same problems tend to perpetuate: a dearth of internal communication; no mandation of policy; a lack of compliance control and monitoring; clients not using their TMC as effectively as they could be; and a lack of MI and analysis. Bouda’s Murphy, meanwhile, is keen to stress
that consultants won’t meddle with the parts of a client’s travel programme that are already ticking along nicely. “The first thing we do is an evaluation and advise which parts of a travel programme to keep and what needs to change.
we can create an opportunity assessment report,” says buyingTeam's Rowley. “The critical bit is, once opportunities have been identified, that the changes recommended will need to be agreed and implemented. Previous tenders, benchmark exercises and market intelligence can all be a good indication of potential savings that new clients can achieve.” Interestingly, HRG Consulting – a division of the travel management company – launched a return on investment guarantee just over a year ago that covers air, hotel and car hire negotiation projects, and has not yet had to pay out. HRG is by no
means the only travel management company to operate a consulting arm – or at least some degree of consultancy – with BCD similarly operating its Advito consultancy. Such offshoots tend to polarise opinion,
with some in the industry believing that a consultancy attached to a TMC cannot offer corporates truly impartial advice due to a perceived bias towards that TMC’s own preferred suppliers and inhouse technology. BuyingTeam’s Rowley, for example, says:
“We’re truly impartial as we have no supplier deals or marketing or commission-related agreements in place. Decisions are based on what is best for the client, not ourselves or a wider supplier network.” Bouda’s Murphy agrees: “The key difference is that our advice is totally independent and impartial. Having worked inside a TMC we know there are products that you're supposed to promote.” Of course, HRG Consulting
sees things differently. The TMC’s director of client management UK and Ireland, Susan Lancaster, says, “Consultancies rely on repeat business and that repeat business is based on success and credibility. That wouldn’t exist if they couldn’t prove those qualities.” Backing that notion up with statistics,
BCD’s Advito averages over 200 consulting engagements every year with an impressive 95 per cent repeat engagement.
Lancaster adds, “If you’re carrying out a piece
of work for a client, the basis of your findings has to come from full, comprehensive research to ensure the credibility of the consultant, whether they’re independent or TMC-owned. “They have to operate completely indep- endently and TMC-owned consultancies are equally likely to go in the opposite direction, away from the travel management company,” she says, somewhat ruefully. “The question to ask is not who owns the consultancy – whether they’re a one-man band or TMC-owned – but what is the knowledge and expertise of that particular consultant,” Lancaster concludes. Of pertinence to both styles of consultancy is concern among travel managers that their role within an organisation is put in question should they find the need to hire such outsourced expertise – are some actually scared of being put out of a job? “The bright ones aren’t,” says Bouda’s Murphy. “We complement travel managers, standing shoulder to shoulder with them. We’re absolutely not a threat. “One travel manager we work with is very
much front of house and we’re in the back room providing support. Implementation is resource hungry, for example, and we can really free up their time,” she says. Offering one final piece of advice to travel managers eyeing up the services of consultants, the Corporate Travel Partnership’s Daykin says, “Optimising the travel programme is much more than procurement. It’s much more than chasing so-called ‘savings’ and it’s much more than focusing on ‘cost’. “The bottom line is, if an organisation optimises its travel programme on all aspects of the category, they will deliver their travel requirements at the lowest practicable cost. Surely that’s what it’s all about, isn’t it?” Turnover for a look at who's out there to help.
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