Now, more than ever, a robust expense management system is seen as a vital weapon in the battle to control travel costs. Bob Papworth reports
SEARCH ALL YOU LIKE for shock-horror news stories about the decision by HRG Worldwide – once simply known as plain Hogg Rob – to change itself from a “travel management company” into an “international corporate services provider”, and you will search in vain.
Those of us who actually noticed remained singularly unmoved. In an age when Eddie Stobart and Norbert Dentressangle do ‘logistics’ rather than haulage, and office cleaning is known as ‘facilities management’, one disconcertingly-vague company tagline is much the same as another. After all, it’s not so long ago that
‘travel management companies’ were mere ‘business travel agents’. So HRG has re-worded itself. So what?
Oh, we of little foresight! As
cash-strapped companies seek to outsource everything under the sun, ‘corporate services’ has actually become the more accurate name of the game, encompassing anything and everything from recruitment to payroll, IT to accounting, catering to legal services, and most things in between.
Some areas of business, nevertheless, have long remained sacrosanct, and travel managers and travel management companies (TMCs) have always maintained that ‘travel’ is – or should be – one of them.
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IT’S BEEN EMOTIONAL Buying travel, the argument goes, is not like buying loo-rolls or flip- charts, because travel is ‘emotive’. Employees don’t much care if their phones aren’t disinfected on a nightly basis, but they care quite a lot if they end up in a seedy flophouse instead of the country house golf resort’n’spa to which they
have become accustomed. Should they then choose to spend their way out of the situation, and should their employer subsequently refuse to reimburse the outlay, then ‘caring quite a lot’ doesn’t really cover it. Expenses, like travel, are ‘emotive’. Put the two together, as in ‘travel and expense management’, and you’re just asking for trouble. Your averagely-disgruntled road warrior will grudgingly use his credit card to upgrade himself from back-of-bus to business class, but withhold or delay
reimbursement of the subsequent expense claim, and you’re into blood/wall-interface territory.
EFFECTIVE SYSTEMS However, the travel/expense combo is also desperately needed. According to a Carlson Wagonlit- sponsored study by the Global Business Travel Association (GBTA), 65 per cent of travel managers who “most effectively achieve their business goals” use a travel expense management system. Only 49 per cent of “less