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FEATURE SME SECTOR


“A few hotels and airlines will play ball


on cluster deals,” says Milne, predicated on a volume commitment. The TMC also offers a Smart Stay Rate, which provides room upgrades and free laundry, wifi and breakfast at 50 chain hotels. Some 70 per cent of Business Travel


Direct’s clients are SMEs and “100 per cent of them want offline, touch and feel service,” agrees the company’s managing director, Julie Oliver. “We effectively act as their outsourced travel manager. You target behaviour as they haven’t got the spend,” she advises. CWT's Turner agrees, educating clients


“SMEs are not suited to self-booking tools.


We go with high-touch, offline service and with a policy that’s all about best fare on the day”





around but best fare on the day is best practice. Hillgate’s Dix says that, in any case, “80 per cent of the time the cheapest fare is not what you have in your route deal.” Only when your spend reaches £500,000 can TMCs start to make it work in their favour, particularly if there are set destinations to leverage. “We’re the ultimate search engine,”


says Nigel Turner, senior director of programme management & business services, UK & Ireland at CWT. “SMEs get unbiased 100 per cent content, our portal for any online bookings, a bit of MI, a basic safety and security product and 24-hour coverage. They want solutions which can be understood easily as they have little resource.” Arguably the original SME TMC is Corporate Traveller, set up by FCm in 1999. Its general manager Graham Milne explodes the myth that all an SME wants is a self-booking tool. “We have 2,000 customers in the UK and only 150 have a self-booking tool. SMEs are not suited to SBTs,” he says. “We go with high-touch, offline service and with a policy that’s all about best fare on the day.”


As MDDUS’ Macey outlined, it is the TMC's expertise – for creative ticketing, benchmarking and the like - that is being tapped. Some TMCs pool their SME volumes to


leverage discounts.


Corporate Traveller, for example, works on cluster deals with Eurostar with ten customers.


on advance purchasing and restrictive fares to curtail costs. CWT's National Travel Solution is a web-based tool with a simplistic fee structure and simpler contracting based on an offline service. Just this spring, HRG launched Fraedom,


a sister brand, targeting SMEs. It is an online and offline travel and expenses product with zero online charge geared to point-to-point travel patterns. “It’s a simple T&E solution that bridges


the gap between travel and expenses and takes the pain out of it,” says Kyle Ferguson, CCO of Fraedom.


What the supply chain provides Think incentives, loyalty schemes and specialised products and services rather than discounts. Airline loyalty schemes are popular, namely Virgin Atlantic’s Flying Co and BA's On Business, although Corporate Traveller’s Milne says, “BA points are not worth as much as saving and flying on another airline.” The two-to-four-star Choice Hotels, for


example, offers negotiated rates, and a range of chain-wide discounts based on a sliding scale, but the company’s Brian Garvan says corporates often lack knowledge of their booking volumes. “We’re sales people so we ask questions – the when, where and how many nights – to capture an idea of their travel


patterns, so it’s frustrating,” says Garvan. Remote locations trigger deals based on just 50 nights a year, but in high demand city centres the threshold would be hundreds of nights a year. Under that number and expect free car parking or breakfast rather than a discount. A points-based loyalty scheme allows SMEs ➔


THE BUSINESS TRAVEL MAGAZINE 39


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