THE LOWDOWN IN BRIEF
• FCM'S online portal created inhouse in the US is now being rolled out to Europe and Asia, its main advantage being a single sign-on, from which everything can be managed, including all third party suppliers. By Q3 this year, it will have the ability to suck in all the Evolvi and Concur bookings into a single dashboard and provide a confirmation. “There is no one tool that does everything perfectly. If it did, this wouldn’t exist. It’s been a bit of a gap for us until now,” says Alex Armstrong, global director of sales at FCm. “And it’s cost effective too as we’re in control and there is no additional charge from a third party.”
• JUDITH Gledhill, the UK travel manager at E.on for the last three and a half years, joined consultancy Bouda at the end of February, effectively filling the shoes left by Simone Buckley, now CEO of ITM. Gledhill will become a director at the consultancy and brings rich experience from 26 years in travel as a buyer, offering consultancy in programme evaluations and optimisation, sourcing and cost reduction. At E.on, Gledhill saved the company £5million over the time she worked there. She also implemented a new hotel booking agent, struck an industry first deal with Premier Inn, in 2009, and witnessed the company’s online adoption rise from 18 to 86 per cent across all spend categories. “I can go and make a difference,” she says. “I like to get my hands dirty and make it happen.”
• BCD Travel was demonstrating two new software tools at the Business Travel Show. The first, called routeRANK, sits in front of a booking engine aggregating data from various sources to produce various travel options for the entire home or office to destination journey. The resulting options can be ranked by total journey time, cost, carbon emissions and a productivity rating. It's currently in a test phase and is limited to European travel, with a view to expanding to global coverage. "It challenges traditional thinking about the 'cost' of a whole trip, and it's very close to finding the true door-to-door journey and that's something that has been talked about for years," says Barry Fleming, marketing manager at BCD Travel. The second development, in cooperation with PI Benchmark, is a data integration and analytical tool that brings together data from multiple sources that enables users to drill down to new levels of detail. It too is still in the trial phase.
for Equilibrium ➔
New TMC aims
GUEST COLUMN
STEPHEN HOBDAY DIRECTOR OF SALES, FLYBE
THERE'S a new TMC on the block, and it’s called Equilibrium Travel Management, or EQ for short. The Scottish TMC has been founded by Franc Jeffrey, the former chief operating officer of Colpitts World Travel, and expects to achieve around a £3million turnover in its first year. The company says it offers services on a transparent, fee- based system, “as opposed to the ticket plus mark-up model adopted by others in the sector”, and has already signed deals with six high profile corporate clients. “EQ will bring clarity and transparency to corporate travel bookings by charging a flat fee. This means we can search and choose the best deals and options to meet the company’s travel budget and policy,” says Jeffrey. “A travel company which relies on hidden charges is always likely
to be drawn to higher value tickets as it provides the best returns for them. It means the customer does not know that the transatlantic business class ticket costing £2,500 would really have cost £2,000 with £500 going to the travel agent.” Jeffrey continues, “We think we
could easily save a typical SME ten per cent of their travel budget by operating more transparently and in the interests of the company. This figure could be improved substantially following a full travel policy review. For one London-based company we were able to demonstrate savings of £500,000 on a spend of £1.4m.” EQ also has a strong develop-
ment team, creating new tech- nology it claims increases the efficiency of its agents by 30 per cent, and operates a meetings and events department.
CLICK TRAVEL IS JUST THE TICKET BTS
NEWS
CLICK Travel has unveiled its latest raft of inhouse tech-
nology developments, including a traveller tracking facility and a 'print at home' rail ticketing tool. It is the first TMC to enable clients to receive a train ticket instantly as a PDF file and print it on regular plain A4 paper on a home printer, all within the bounds of policy compliance and pre-trip approval functions that are part of its Travel Cloud software. The print-outs feature a unique barcode that is scannable at some stations, though the technology is expected to be introduced more
widely across the rail network as operating franchises are renewed. "Tickets on departure is fine
but people don't like the risk of leaving home without a ticket. Customers are excited by this and we expect our competitors to imitate us," says Click Travel's managing director, Simon McLean. "It makes life easier for the end user but also foregoes the added delivery and collection costs associated with ticket distribution." The TMC also showcased the
latest version of Travel Cloud, including traveller tracking, alerts and a taxi booking tool.
SOME believe the word is derived from the acronym TIP – To Insure Promptness – but tipping is a concept I’ve often felt pressurised by but don’t challenge enough. Even those of us who work in service industries all too often compensate disproportionately for an average or downright awful experience, just for etiquette’s sake. We’ve all been taken in by rude or dismissive waiters launching charm offensives at the eleventh hour, just before presenting the bill. Understanding the cultural variations of tipping protocol is a minefield with expectations varying enormously worldwide – it’s even considered an insult in some cultures. Visitors to
www.tipping.org can view ‘tips on tipping’ and, at
www.lousytippers.com, even search to see if your name appears and you’ve been publicly exposed as a bad tipper! Whether or not to tip and how much is a tricky dilemma for business travellers. When enter- taining clients, you must be prudent but not appear miserly – should you pay gratuities yourself, or face the finance team’s inquisition once the expense claim goes in? I once meekly surrendered all my remaining small notes to a grouchy cab driver, only to be confronted later by a hotel bellboy menacingly negotiating an amount that “I could bring to the lobby any time during my stay”. My waitress later barked at me that she’d “taken the liberty of adding a service charge so as not to cause me any inconvenience or embarrassment”. Customer care at its finest! On the flipside, a driver who also
took it on himself to be my tour guide and ‘personal minder’, graciously welcomed a well- deserved gratuity as an unexpected bonus to the pride he clearly had from simply doing his job well. Unfortunately, because we’re not discerning, the value of a well deserved tip for those going the extra mile is undermined by those received by the mediocre. So posters on
lousytippers.com,
just consider why you have the need to log on!
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