“We went from a standing start to having 500 engineers in the first year so we’re getting more savvy about hotel bookings now. More hotels want to talk to us about price now“
says Mark Douglas, sales director at Kelly’s hotel booking agency, HRS. Kelly’s Bradley adds: “As our customer contracts are charged per project rather than per day, it is crucial that we keep our hotel room costs down.”
Step 3 The first thing HRS did was take a
look at what and where Kelly were spending – based on spend with the existing supplier over the previous two months – and presented a detailed savings analysis which showed savings of between 20-30 per cent. “Across all our sites we spend £800,000 per annum on hotels so it’s good money to save,” says Bradley. HRS set up their corporate booking portal
for Kelly and loaded the company's 40 depot locations, a mix of BAR (best available rates), HRS rates and Kelly rates, with live availability at time of booking. The portal was also loaded with Kelly’s travel policy and entry fields covering all cost centres. “We now use Travelodge and lots of independent hotels as when it comes to price competitiveness they’re good,” says HRS’ Douglas. The portal can search hotels by proximity to the required location or by price, and for Kelly it’s by price. Kelly is proactive in alerting HRS to possible
new contracts and potential volumes in new areas so they can begin the hotel negotiation process without delay. “It’s a soft benefit of our good relationship
with the client,” says HRS's Douglas. “We sign up hotels in that new location in advance rather than waiting for Kelly to win the contract.”
Step 4 Product training was
undertaken for the two bookers who then transferred their skills to four newly assigned bookers in other parts of the business. “People grasped the system quickly. It’s very intuitive and bookings were very high from the start,” says HRSs Douglas. Bradley and his team were also
clear in their communications to staff about why HRS was appointed and the benefits they were going to bring.
Step 5 The 70-80 per
cent of bookings that were previously going to Premier Inn has now
dropped to more like 20-25 per cent, while the average rate has dropped by between 21-25 per cent. Kelly now has a better spread of hotels – many of them independents to satisfy the remote locations where there are usually no chain hotels – and space to park the man with van or man with lorry. “We had no real bargaining power before as
we would say, ‘We’re here for the next three weeks’,“ recalls Bradley. Now, with six-month lengths of contract through BT, plus more engineers working on rail projects and others spent installing ’Boris’ bikes, volumes were increasing and Kelly has better leverage with hotel suppliers.
“People grasped the new system quickly. It’s very intuitive and bookings were very high from the start”
“We went from a standing start to having 500 engineers in the first
year so we’re getting more savvy about hotel bookings now. More hotels want to talk to us about price so we’ve definitely raised our profile,” says Bradley. The other real benefit is one
of resource, relieving the two bookers who previously accepted all the phone calls. Now the online process has
meant spreading the load among six people able to get on to the HRS portal and deal with all bookings. The use of HRS is mandated. “By pushing the system out to the divisions, it has become a shared resource throughout the company, improving efficiency and taking the
strain away from limited resources at headquarters,” says Bradley. Round-the-clock telephone support is also crucial for engineers when they are delayed on site and need to stay overnight at short notice. “It’s great that even at 11pm our people on the road can still make a booking via their smartphones,” says Bradley.
Step 6 “We’re £100,000 better off now than
had we done nothing,” says Bradley. His focus now is on streamlining the internal processes for invoices, which is still quite a chore. The company has a central credit card used by all hotels as a booking guarantee and also as a charging mechanism. After finding a solution for processing the
pile of invoices, next on Bradley's list of priorities is to receive more useful MI reports – ones that he has more control over – and to integrate with the purchasing department to make accounting more efficient. At present, Kelly downloads reports on a weekly basis detailing what has been spent, average room spend, in what destinations and by whom. HRS takes a download of mainly the top 15 hotels and rates being paid to benchmark internally in an ongoing process of improving rates. Finally, Bradley would like to get hotel invoices to match up with payments; they rarely do as hotel food and drink costs inevitably muddy the picture. “We’re fine tuning all the time,” he says. “This is our second year with these volumes and we may look at other solutions. We’re taking one step at a time,” concludes Bradley.
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