GUEST BLOG: Smart Travel Expenses: Visibility and the Science of Spending

In the US, approximately $1.3 trillion is spent on business travel annually, but if you were asked exactly how much money you or your business had spent trying to win a customer, would you know? Without visibility of how much you spend on prospects, it’s easy to overspend on customers who might not convert in the long-run, and it’s interesting to see exactly how many barriers there are to visibility across most organisations.

Cloudy Skies

Most companies agree that in order to make money, you first have to spend money. Whether it’s taking prospects for dinner or flying out to visit their offices, organisations usually build up a number of expenses while building relationships with existing and potential customers.

But many businesses find it difficult to track spending when team members compromise budgets by going off-piste and booking travel and hotels via off-platform sites. Companies often have separate systems for travel booking, ticketing and expense management as well, making tracking and reconciling travel spend difficult, with travel managers struggling to plan for the future.

Travel Fatigue

Beyond lack of tracking and disparate systems, many organisations underestimate the cost of booking travel. In our personal lives, we’ve all gone to Expedia (or any travel site) and typed in a destination only to get 200 pages of results, realising after an entire evening that 90% are useless because you won’t get to where you want to go at a time that actually works.

Think about this from a business perspective: how much time and money is that costing the employee in charge of booking travel, who has to go through those results to calculate backwards to see the exact time an employee would have to leave and how long it takes to get to the airport, while also determining the best and most cost-effective way to get to a destination and back?

Too much choice is causing travel fatigue and limited visibility, making the static part of travel expenses much more expensive that we’d assume. 

Maximum Visibility

In these situations, having complete and end-to-end visibility of travel expenses is key. It’s about aligning this visibility with commercial actions and a clear outline of sales team budgets, which should enable managers to calculate ROI and see whether a client is worth the investment.

With this in mind, organisations can draw a line in the sand and decide exactly how much money they are going to spend on a given opportunity or person, and can see how much time and money has already been spent trying to win that business.  If the amount is exceeded, then approval is requested in the very same system that they would normally request a commercial discount in. 

With all of your expenditures laid out, it’s then easy to see illogical spending patterns, with some sales teams spending a large amount on small prospects. In sales, there’s a science to spending, and without it, organisations are at risk of throwing money or time towards unworthy prospects and losing control of their travel and expenses.

Business travel is an important and valuable aspect of organisations around the world, yet most still don’t have the visibility they should over expenses, or struggle to set—and stick to—budgets. This is something that, unfortunately, is only going to get harder with business and budget changes caused by Brexit.

Sales teams and finance departments need the ability to track, budget, and predict travel and expenses, in order to have peace of mind that their expenditure is warranted. In order to have a sales growing and sustainable pipeline that is thriving, not just surviving, we need to be able to apply a science to our spending, and to do this, it’s essential that we remove the obstacles to complete visibility across travel expenses.

This post was written by Eoin Landers, Head of Product and Operations, SalesTrip.To learn more about SalesTrip’s all-in-one travel and expenses platform on Salesforce, www.salestrip.com.

SalesTrip is exhibiting at Business Travel Show on 20-21 February 2019 at Olympia London - secure your free ticket now at www.businesstravelshow.com/register 

GUEST BLOG: It’s time for OBTs to put the traveller first

Do you remember when online travel agents (OTAs) became a ‘thing’? You didn’t have to scour through brochures any more, or go into town and sit down with someone face to face, or wait on hold for ages to book over the phone. It was bliss, right? You could just open the web page, search, book, pay, job done.

That must have been, what, 15 years ago? But even back then, before sites became so much slicker and quicker, there was no user guide, no manual, no one-to-one training session needed to help you navigate the site. Even 15 years ago, booking trips online was pretty self-explanatory, obvious and straight forward.

And then, with the explosion of the Internet and mobile technology, things just got easier and easier. We now use technology for everything, not just for booking flights, hotels and train tickets. We buy groceries and clothes online, order flowers, watch TV, play games… and that’s before we’ve even mentioned the screen time our eyes burn through on social media.

What this means is that we’re incredibly savvy and demanding technology consumers. We want the technology we use to deliver a seamless, frictionless and omni-channel experience. And we want the simplicity, convenience and immediacy we enjoy from lifestyle sites to be replicated in the tools we use for work.

So, why then, are some online booking tools still so ugly, clunky and off-putting to use? Surely, in this era of travellercentricity, there really is no excuse for not delivering an OBT that’s been built with travellers in mind. After all, a happy traveller is also a more productive, empowered and loyal employee.

There are benefits for travel managers and bookers from having access to a good OBT, too. Encouraging online adoption among travellers can drive compliance; if the technology you/your TMC provides is as easy to use as a leisure travel booking tool, it goes without saying that travellers are more likely to use it. Load it with your travel policy and supplier preferences, and it will also tempt them away from going rogue.

When travellers use your OBT to book online, you can track your team, which leads to enhanced traveller safety and improved duty of care. It also means, should anything happen, you can change a traveller’s itinerary quickly and easy and then communicate those changes with them one on one or to the whole group.

At Traveldoo, we are part of the Expedia Group, which means we have an army of experience delivering consumer-focused travel technology solutions and our online booking tool is designed to mimic the Expedia booking experience. Simplicity is at its heart and our mantra is ‘three clicks to book’. Now, you can’t get much easier than that, can you?

This blog post was written by Sam Cande, Traveldoo UK country manager. Traveldoo is exhibiting at the Business Travel Show, which takes place at London Olympia from 20-21 February. You can register for a free visitor pass at https://www.businesstravelshow.com/register

GUEST BLOG: Staying power - ​how your hotel policy can help win the battle for top recruits

It’s a tough job market for employers. If you want to attract the top recruits, you’ll have to fight for them. When taking new roles, many employees want benefits that offer better work-life balance, like more paid time off and flexible work arrangements.

For those who travel frequently, a good travel policy is essential to work-life balance and can be a key factor when determining whether to stay in a job or accept a new one. In fact, 59% of North American business travellers and 66% of Latin American travellers told GBTA that a company's travel policy is an important factor when deciding to take a job with a new employer.

What can you do to make sure your hotel policy appeals to recruits?

1. Offer convenient locations and properties

Time and time again, business travellers say convenience is their number one priority. It’s not an unreasonable request. Who doesn’t want an extra 30 minutes of prep time or sleep before heading out to a meeting?

Yet, if you only rely on GDS content, your hotel program may not offer properties at all of the locations your travellers visit. Offering properties from third-party hotel content sources like Booking.com and Expedia Partner Services can provide travellers with access to more locations and accommodation types (independent hotels, apartments, etc.) that are not available in the GDS.

2. Be realistic about rates

Beyond convenience, travellers want to stay somewhere clean, comfortable and safe. Quality matters. While price does not equate to quality, there are significant differences in average room night rates by location. When setting city caps, make sure you know average rates by city and how much rates are expected to grow. Carlson Wagonlit's  2019 Global Travel Forecast can help you determine rate increases by region. Also, consider the type or class of property your travellers expect to stay at when setting rate caps.

3. Help travellers save time

Scrolling through pages of hotel property results trying to decide which hotel is the right fit – not so much fun. Neither is searching through several sites. Partner with a travel management company (TMC) that offers personalised search results. 

4. Offer loyalty perks

Travellers care so much about loyalty points that they’ll risk their personal safety to earn them. Literally. 3 in 10 business travellers surveyed by CWT said they would sacrifice safety for loyalty points and incentives. The good news is that travellers can book rates with loyalty points through RoomIt. The even better news is that they can earn additional hotel loyalty points through Loyalty Booster, driving in-channel bookings to your preferred suppliers.

5. Make Bleisure easier

More companies are allowing travellers to add a holiday to the end of their work trips. However, most travellers book their trips through consumer sites. Make sure travellers are clear if they can take advantage of your preferred rates or TMC when booking personal extensions and how to pay for those accommodations so they can book their full trip all at once. 

Blog author: Scott Hyden, Chief Experience Officer, RoomIt by CWT, who will be exhibiting at Business Travel Show on 20-21 February at Olympia London. Secure your free ticket now at www.businesstravelshow.com.