Most good travel management companies will work with you to understand your business goals and help you define a business travel strategy to support them. Let’s say your business aims to reduce costs by 20% this year. Your TMC may help you devise a plan to lower travel costs to help you achieve this aim without reducing the traveller’s experience, here are some example strategies they could suggest.

Developing a preferred hotel programme, negotiating the lowest hotel rates and value-added benefits for the traveller such as upgraded room type, car parking and flexible cancellation. 

• Introducing new travel suppliers and corporate agreements to offer savings.
• Educating your employees on the advantages of planning ahead, and more carefully planning the timing of the trip and meetings to make use of lower priced advance purchase air and rail tickets.
• Implementing and managing airline corporate reward programmes. 
• Providing access to Internet and distressed hotel inventory to ensure a good range of accommodation options and rates.
• Implementing an online booking tool to reduce booking fees and improve productivity. 

Using data to reduce costs

The examples described are all actual measures taken for one of our customers, which collectively saved our customer £150k on their travel spend during one year. Crucially, all these actions could be measured accurately with data and KPIs so our customer could see the benefits and track progress as it happened. And it didn’t stop there, once one objective was met, we’d collectively define another one, and so on.

This makes it simple for our customer because they know which metrics to pay attention to and therefore, doesn’t get bogged down with all the data. And, because we do the analysis and provide the insight, our customer can focus on the actions needed to deliver results. 

As well as defining the goals your analysis of business travel spend seeks to achieve, it’s important to identify the data to help track your progress, such as the various key performance indicators (KPIs) that will help you monitor your results. At a very high level, these can include:

• Total business travel spend 
• Spend under contract with a TMC vs off contract leakage
• Spend with each travel suppliers such as airlines, hotels, train operators, etc. 
• Number of bookings made online vs offline
• Number of days travel booked in advance
• Adherence to corporate travel policy 
• Class of travel/standard of hotel 
• Achieved savings
• Missed savings opportunities

This list could go on forever, but what’s important is to figure out how travel aligns with your business’ overall goals. This should allow you to find out which KPIs are relevant to your travel programme, and with so many metrics to consider, it’s having focus on these key result areas that will stop you getting distracted by less important statistics and figures. 

Historically, travel policies in their simplest form have outlined guidelines on what employees can and can’t do when booking business travel, however, this is changing. Rather than issuing a blanket travel policy focused on controlling corporate travel spend, Travel Managers and Travel Buyers are becoming increasingly concerned with matters such as traveller wellbeing, duty of care and employee benefits. So much so that various departments each have a stake in how a travel policy is put together, which can make defining a set of guidelines that everyone is happy with quite a daunting prospect. 

Ask yourself these questions when updating or writing a travel policy for the first time.

Why do you need a business travel policy?

What is the purpose of your business travel policy? Speak with the different areas of your business that have an opinion about what the policy should be. Your finance Director may be focused on controlling travel costs, yet your HR Manager may be more concerned about keeping your top travellers happy to boost staff retention. Once you understand the business’ objectives, you can create a policy that balances costs with traveller wellbeing.

Will one size fit all?

It’s always been common practice to have a policy for the majority and a different set of guidelines for the most senior employees, but does this traditional approach go far enough? Consider who your most frequent travellers are, if they travel excessively, should they be entitled to an extra level of comfort to compensate them for the stress of a busy travel schedule?

If your budget can’t stretch to business class or a better rated hotel, consider smaller perks such as lunges at the airport or a chauffeur driven car to make their trip just a little bit more enjoyable. Little gestures like this can go a long way to letting an employee know their efforts are appreciated, which makes a big difference to employee satisfaction. 

How do you communicate it?

Once you’ve defined your policy, you need to make sure everyone it concerns understands what’s acceptable and what is not. A communication from senior management usually holds a lot more weight as people understand it’s going to be taken seriously. And while the Intranet may seem like a good place to put it – don’t stop there. 

If you have an online booking tool, make sure your travel policy controls are bult in so it will only let the user book policy compliant trips. Likewise, if you use a TMC ask them to enforce it for you. You may want to use incentives to encourage people to really engage with the guidelines or have different departments compete with each other to make the most policy compliant bookings. 

How do you enforce it?

Writing and sharing a travel policy is one thing but if you don’t enforce it, it’s a complete waste of time, and this still happens. Whilst surprising, it’s not unheard of for hugely successful businesses to put a complete ban on travel because their travel policy hasn’t been adhered to and they’re way over budget before year end. Don’t fall into the same trap.

Consider using a travel management company if you don’t already have one, and ensure all travel bookings are made through your preferred partner. If they provide you with an online booking tool, make sure your policy parameters are built into the tool and that it’s flexible enough to have different policies for different users. With your travel management company enforcing your policy on your behalf, your life will be much easier.

How do you know if it’s fit for purpose?

A mistake made by many is that they write their travel policy once and then forget about it. To ensure your travel policy continues to meet your objectives, you need to let it evolve when it needs to. Your travel managaement company should be able to provide reports on policy compliance and exceptions along with reasons why but you also need to be open to the opinions of your travellers too. 

Managing and reducing business travel costs is of course very important but it’s also important to manage and reduce traveller risk as well as keeping an eye on traveller wellbeing. Balancing all these things can be tricky, but if you take a collaborative approach with the key stakeholders in your business, you should be able to strike the balance.