of sale. And as independent consultant Andrew Solum says, “every company has a way of calculating cost of sale, and travel is only one element”.
EVALUATING VALUE There is a universal belief that the re- sponsibility for evaluating value lies with the corporate. Pancaldi says: “Assessment will go on within the client organisation, whether it’s down to the individual trip or the whole budget.” According to Knights, travel suppliers
and travel management companies “can’t comment on whether they get a return on the travel itself, but we can measure the cost of a trip with all the normal metrics, and we can help the customer determine the level at which that cost can be attributed across a number of trips or a project. But the return on a trip is something the customer must calculate.” Pancaldi says that companies are mea- suring trip cost, but “the outcome would be different according to company and sector”. So, there could be quite different costs between companies or travellers for a three-day trip between London and Paris, but so, too, could there be a different value for the company. A maintenance worker might provide the required service to one account; a com- mercial director might have six meetings that could potentially deliver millions in incremental sales. Trips can have different costs accord- ing to class of travel, carrier or time of travel and, consequently, different returns – perhaps because of more productive time because of lounge access – and so do individual travellers with their different hourly rates and objectives.
WHO’S MAKING THE DECISIONS? GTMC’s Wait believes the biggest barrier to connecting trip return to trip cost could lay in where the travel pro- gramme decision-making sits within a company. He points out that the finance and procurement departments’ natural objectives are to reduce or contain costs, while a managing director or
54 BBT MAY/JUNE 2015
It seems a big gap remains between recognising the need for business travel and recognising its benefit to the business
chief commercial officer would be looking for opportunities for revenue growth. Wait also cites the option of separat-
ing travel that is necessary to maintain a business from that which is undertaken to grow the business. The natural outcome of this might be to have one travel policy for internal trips managed by procurement while have another, managed by sales, for client-facing travel. Of course, there are also poten-
tially ways of measuring return beyond sales revenue. As well as the travel cost of any trip, there is the cost in time of an employee being out of the office – shouldn’t that time be as produc- tive as possible? Pancaldi believes that the return can be increased in simple ways such as planning fewer trips, but more time or meetings per trip. Then, there is the old chestnut of being able to spend more time working on a train than on a plane. Wait queries the wisdom of travel poli-
cies that outlaw first class rail travel. “What would happen if I was sitting at my desk reading a book or listening to music?” he asks. “You’d be told to go back to work. Yet a lot of companies expect their people to travel in standard class where they can’t work. They’re not combining the productivity element with the cost of the item – the travel.” It seems a big gap remains between
recognising the need for business travel and recognising its benefit to the business.
BUYINGBUSINESSTRAVEL.COM
Investing in people
ASTRAZENECA HAS THREE CLEAR BUSINESS OBJECTIVES: scientific research; restoring growth; and making Astrazeneca a great place to work. Kerrie Henshaw-Cox is global commercial lead for travel services at the pharma giant. She says the travel team works hard to ensure that the travel programme supports the objective of making the company a great place to work.
This underlines the point that ROI varies with the sector and from company to company. She says: “In our organisation there has definitely been a shift to the traveller. We want to look after our employees and we want to do the right thing. We think they will spend the money wisely.”
The company has started a global project to determine how much is the right amount of travel in relation to work-life balance, health and well-being. Henshaw-Cox says:
“We need to make sure we retain the talent we have. It’s a competitive industry so we need to differentiate ourselves.” There are clearly financial constraints and objectives, but as part of supporting the company objective, Henshaw-Cox’s team comprehensively measures traveller satisfaction, and there is extensive consultation with travellers and travel bookers when the travel programme is reviewed annually.
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