By BETTY LOW
Appointing a TMC when there has
not been one before can look as if you’re just adding 5-7 per cent on to the travel budget, so it’s incumbent on the travel manager to explain how that uplift in costs is likely to deliver savings on the other 95 per cent of travel cost. This investment will enable you to get
the data to address your hotel and airline spend. Until everyone has moved over to booking via an online booking tool or the TMC, booking data will be lost. One generally needs six months’ quality data to decide whether what your travellers do is right and aligned with travel policy. Once you have the data you can analyse it, build a plan of action and use it with your sup- plier base, especially hotels and airlines. You’ll be able, in some cases, to give your employee a better experience for a cost-effective price. In my experience companies do not necessarily always code expense data in a consistent way. Therefore, you really
BUYINGBUSINESSTRAVEL.COM
need the fine detail that only the TMC data can provide you. For example, you can’t influence your spend with airlines unless you know city pair, time of booking and class of booking.
TRAVEL MANAGER, aerospace company
WE ALWAYS HAVE THE CHALLENGE of whether we are finding the cheapest ticket – but that is not the same thing as questioning whether your department is value-for-money. But we do have to build a business case for any major change of supplier, such as implement- ing a new TMC or booking tool. For that we would build our business
case around service but factor in the cost of change. For example, one TMC or booking tool might be £100,000 cheaper than another but it might cost us £300,000 to change our own IT systems. This comes from internal labour time and charges required to
change interfaces to other internal systems, such as HR databases and finance databases. We have to convince our managers
within the travel procurement team that it is worth incurring this cost of change, and that’s where we have to build a busi- ness case. We can work out the cost of change and the cost of the service, but we have to estimate the effect on the service that a new supplier will provide. If we change from supplier A to
supplier B the question, “would the traveller be affected and if so, how?” is not easily measurable. If I say, “you’re now going to book through this tool rather than this one,” how do I know if you’re going to love it or loathe it? For me if you’re doing a business case
for travel, you would get the numbers – for example, the cost of change – but you also have to consider people’s feel- ings and the impact of travel on them. Employee welfare counts for more in some organisations than in others.
BBT November/December 2016 49
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