Why Good Travel Management:

• Understanding of Arvato’s company culture
• Willingness to create a service to meet Arvato’s specific requirements
• Innovative online booking tool
• Access to web-based hotel content within a controlled environment

The Company

Arvato is a trusted global business outsourcing partner to the private and public sectors in the UK and Ireland. With more than 50 years of experience in outsourcing, Arvato combines expertise in business process outsourcing (BPO), financial solutions, customer services, supply chain management and public sector and citizen services to deliver innovative, individual solutions. Arvato has long-term partnerships with some of the most respected companies in the UK and globally, as well as innovative public sector clients. A division of Bertelsmann, Arvato employs over 1500 people in the UK & Ireland.

The Problem

Arvato has been a Good Travel Management customer since 2005, and despite having a formal business travel booking process in place, there was still room for improvement and cost reduction. As part of Good Travel Management’s continual improvement process, we led Arvato in a review of their total group travel expenditure. We concluded that online booking was a natural step to streamline business travel bookings even further with the potential to drive down business travel costs and improve productivity for Arvato’s employees.

The Solution

We implemented Good Travel Management’s online booking tool, GT Online, so Arvato’s employees could make their own bookings in a simple portal fully supported by our travel consultants for more complex requirements. We agreed on a detailed project and communications plan to ensure Arvato stakeholders were fully informed of the changes and how they would benefit. To help drive support for online business travel booking, we ran a series of competitions where Arvato employees were rewarded for booking online.

We created a hotel programme which included negotiating exclusive discounted rates at 17 properties that included added value benefits such as meals, WiFi, car parking and discounts on local purchases. These rates complement Good Travel Management’s own discounts along with the excellent rates provided by our connections to online providers such as Expedia and Laterooms.com.

To ensure Arvato achieves maximum value on their business travel expenditure, we analyse Arvato’s travel data to identify trends and improvement opportunities. For air travel, we oversee the analysis of key destinations and airlines and manage enrolment to a range of airline company corporate reward schemes. This gives Arvato the ability to build up points on each applicable airline they travel with, which drives cost savings on future flight bookings.

The Results 2019

Continued work managing the Arvato travel programme has resulted in year-on-year savings from 2018 to 2019. Employees now spend less time researching and booking travel.

• 90% adoption level achieved of online travel bookings
• 15% reduction in hotel rates at strategic locations
• 16% reduction in average UK rail costs
• 15% savings on booking fees