THE KNOWLEDGE 1 step-by-step guide
1
MCNICHOLAS BOOKING PROCEDURE IN NUMBERS 7
The average number of days bookings are now made in advance, up from one
STEP 3
Contracts were signed with Click in April 2012 and the plan was to quickly roll out the system across McNicholas. A few modifications were required, to
incorporate cost centres, locations and defaulting to today’s date, and these were dealt with without fuss or challenge, in contrast to McNicholas’ previous experience. “It’s a refreshing approach; they take on
our feedback and adapt their software as necessary, which makes Click a pleasure to do business with,” says Silver. Travel Cloud is loaded with the particulars
of company policy and the profiles of all the employees that travel on business. There's also a dashboard of who’s travelling, when and where they're going, plus details on future bookings and so on. It’s also colour coded for simplicity: green signifies contracted/preferred rates; amber represents publicly available rates; and red signals an out of policy booking. Whatever it is that travellers are booking –
hotels, train tickets or flights – the booking process is the same.
STEP 4
Some 12 central bookers were appointed from various divisions at McNicholas and they undertook training on the new system via an hour-long WebEx tutorial. The company’s previous training experience
involved 12 bookers being out of the office for half a day. “The system is very intuitive so we went live six weeks later and the changeover was seamless,” said Silver. He anticipated pushback but none came.
STEP 5
Silver's project team colleagues, Bosher and Sharples, created a travel policy together with HR, while Silver himself created a hotel
20%
The percentage of savings accrued as a result of the new booking system
12
The number of central bookers there are, split by company divisions
75%
The percentage time saving made, end-to-end, since implementing the new booking system
programme incorporating 82 contracted rates across 12 different hotel brands. For 2013, the hotel programme was
tendered and further streamlined into three strategic hotel partners that McNicholas would do business with: De Vere Village, Holiday Inn and Jupiter Hotels. Adoption levels on the newly implemented
system are high (over 90 per cent) and cost savings have been in the region of an impressive 25 per cent. Silver has teamed up with Greg Woodley at easyJet for the first airline deal of 2013 which will generate savings of around 20 per cent.
STEP 6
“We’re in a very good place now,” says Silver. “Fees are low and we have excellent account management through Chris Vince and Gemma Jones. It all seems to work. Bookers would voice their opinion if they weren’t happy,” he adds. The benefits have been overwhelming too:
advance booking has increased to an average seven days ahead of travel; there's a 75 per cent time saving on the end-to-end process of booking; and a 20 per cent cost saving on average rates on hotels. Looking to the future of his travel pro-
gramme, Silver says he'd like to increase usage of the four videoconferencing units installed eight months ago – they are currently used mainly for internal meetings and some client meetings – and tie up with a rail company in order to more tightly manage employees' rail bookings. Silver looks back on the project as a steep learning curve and has some words of caution: “As a buyer your instinct is to go out to the supplier that has the biggest buying power, but tread with caution” he says. “Go out and do the deal yourself, and look
at smaller but growing companies. It’s all about relationships, and this has been an enjoyable project to work on.”
“We’re in a very good place now. Fees are low and we have excellent account management. It all seems to work – bookers would voice their opinion if they weren’t happy”
THE BUSINESS TRAVEL MAGAZINE 7
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