“The adoption rates soared in the first month, to 90 per
cent for rail, as was expected, 74 per cent on hotels, and a more surprising 50 per cent on air“
A team comprising Fowke, representatives of the IT and events departments, and a sprinkling of bookers then made that decision.
Step 4 The successful candidate was ATP
Corporate Travel. Heading up the Squire Sanders Hammonds account is business account manager Colin Geddes – “the lawyer account manager with ATP” – with over ten years’ operations experience with ATP, including time spent in an implant with a law firm in the City. “With law firms we have to go the extra mile and assist them from the moment the traveller leaves the office to when they arrive at their destination. It’s high service levels as well as offering value,” says Geddes. “We build all those in at the tender stage.”
Step 5 After ATP was informed in February
of the good news the fun began in terms of implementation, with a tight deadline of March 29 to roll out the programme. ATP created an implementation team of six to meet the challenge. Evolvi was to be used for rail, Conferma for hotels and Amadeus-based e-travel for air. More product tweaks were made
in order to allow bookings for more than four travellers in one booking and the setting up of ‘matter references’ to deal with both the chargeable and non- chargeable bookings. The difficulty was reaching out to all the end users, the 150 bookers. Getting to them took a combined effort by Squire Sanders Hammonds and ATP to instigate appropriate training. Road shows took place in each of the company’s UK locations, running three times a week to give people a flavour of the product. “People found the systems very intuitive,” says Fowke. “It was a fast implementation and a lot of hard work,” he recalls. On the technical front, ATP tailor-made the system by creating a coding system to deal with the chargeable and non-chargeable travel. Fowke also understood what a huge cultural change it was for the bookers to switch from an offline system. “Most people picked it up very quickly,” he says, “but the air system had to have more training, with follow-up sessions. Pressing the button on a £3,000 air booking as opposed to a £120 rail booking sometimes takes a bit of confidence.” The training has been ongoing, with refresher courses, while all new staff are trained on the
“Roadshows were hosted in each of the company’s UK locations, taking place three times a week to give people a flavour of the product”
system immediately, usually by a team of ‘super users’ within the travel booking community. ATP also supports the client
with an e-commerce support team to handle any queries. “It’s like riding a bike,” says Geddes. “Once you use the tools on a regular basis, it's easy.” Contact with ATP is structured, with quarterly face-
to-face meetings at Fowke’s office in Leeds, augmented by monthly reviews by telephone.
Step 6 The adoption rates soared in the first
month, to 90 per cent for rail, as was expected, 74 per cent on hotels, and a more surprising 50 per cent on air. “The first month was amazing,” says Fowke. “A year on and the adoption rates have not only been maintained but have increased,” he says. Additionally, there has been greater take-up
of advance purchase and non-refundable rail tickets, while offline bookings are down to 20 per cent. “We are now better equipped to deal with non-compliance. People can see exactly what they’re buying before they push the button,” says Fowke. ATP provides daily monitoring reports for the previous day’s bookings, against preferred suppliers, class of travel, the offline/online ratio, advance purchase, exceptions and average price of tickets. One of Fowke’s team who looks after accounts payable trawls through the reports. “They are comprehensive
and we tend to look at high level KPIs such as average ticket spend, usage of preferred suppliers and the number of declined savings.”
Step 7 Fowke used the move online to
re-draft what was an already tight travel policy, by mandating online bookings for all UK rail, air and hotel bookings.
Step 8 The next step is likely to be a roll-out
to the non-UK offices of the enlarged Squire Sanders Hammonds practice, now comprising 37 offices worldwide. Internally, other developments are on the horizon. ATP is starting to look at bench- marking, initially with hotels, as Fowke is keen to keep down the cost of the company’s regular London properties and other properties on their hotel programme. With air, the law firm recently joined several corporate loyalty schemes, including BA’s, Star Alliance’s and KLM’s, with the idea of accumulating points to exchange for flight upgrades and hotel nights. “Company air travel is growing and there will be an opportunity to benchmark and negotiate further air savings,” says ATP’s Geddes. “Likewise, if there are more hotel room nights we can negotiate better discounts for 2011.” Fowke is more than happy with the results achieved to date and advises anyone else starting out on this journey to be prepared. “Invest a lot of time in planning at the start,” he says. “Also, be very clear about your objectives and set criteria for the travel management company to meet.”
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