In association with HRS

We ask the SM business travel roundtable how buyers are using the latest technology to change habits and what the future holds

PARTICIPANTS

Chair: Amon Cohen

Jon West, managing director, UK, HRS

John Green, consultant, ProcureGreen

Michael McCoy, project manage, Panasonic Europe

Sarah Makings, European category
manager, procurement, KPMG

Kathryn Bullock, director, Face Marketing

Clare Murphy, director of technology, Bouda

Alison Brooks, head of account management, HRS

Liz Baldwin, senior commercial manager, HMRC

Amon Cohen: The Institute of Travel & Meetings (ITM) has just published its latest survey of buyer members. It said 41 per cent of respondents have 71-90 per cent online booking adoption. That is colossal. What percentage of your bookings are done online?

Sarah Makings: For air bookings, we have 80 per cent compliance on short-haul journeys and point-to-point, and around 50 per cent for hotels.

Michael McCoy: About 25 per cent. Our colleagues in North America have 90 per cent. I’m not sure if that’s feasible in Europe. If we got around 50-60 per cent I’d be quite happy.

John Green: When I was at Rentokil we were just bringing in online booking. Transaction costs were a big behavioural issue. The attitude was: “If I can do this myself, why should I pay?” – whatever the amount you had negotiated.

Michael McCoy: Policy does need to be supported by awareness of the transaction fee cost differential. We are talking about £10-£15 differential between a telephone booking and an online booking.

Jon West: You can have the best pricing in the world, the best procurement policy in the world, but if users don’t find it easy, they will go for the alternative.

Sarah Makings: You have to get senior leadership buy-in or it will fail. One of the benefits for the board is the duty of care responsibility your company has for its travellers. It needs to know where they are and online booking is a great solution for that.

Michael McCoy: If there was an incident somewhere else in the world we have the tools to check how many travellers we have there, providing they have booked through our online booking with the travel management company (TMC). If they’ve booked off-TMC they are on their own and in breach of policy.

Liz Baldwin: Only 50 per cent of our staff have internet access and can book online. With the contract we have there is a very small differential between telephone and online booking. We put in place a self-booking tool last year, which has shown massive savings and we are trying to push that.

Sarah Makings: At KPMG we have a high proportion of international travel and I don’t think booking tools are suitable for that. We have proved that it is cheaper for us to use telephone booking via TMC than online booking. That’s for air but when you are talking about hotels it’s very different. We mandate the use of booking tools for all point-to-point European and domestic journeys, but it is country-specific as well.

Amon Cohen: How did you choose your self-booking tool?

Sarah Makings: We took the decision not to use our TMC’s tool. We keep them very separate. To change an online booking tool at the same time as a TMC for me at KPMG is impossible. We are in the process of implementing a new tool and I am delaying that because it is not 100 per cent right. Some of the TMC tools are the same ones that they are going out to tender to or selecting, so there are some good ones out there, but I don’t think they should restrict what type of tool you use, because every client is different.

Liz Baldwin: We have this dilemma at the moment because we have had very bad feedback from the departments. Somebody else procured the contract we are on at the moment. They were just procurement experts and they passed it over to me at the implementation stage. It was a disaster and it took us two years to get it back on track.

Clare Murphy: If you put the right TMC in place it helps you drive up the adoption of online booking, but it’s not in the TMC’s interest to help you because it gets paid more fees and hopes that you’re not going to buy sensibly. Online adoption for hotel reservations is sometimes quite low if the booking tool offers only hotels that can be booked through the global distribution systems. That means you are going to lose travellers from your programme because they can’t find the hotel that they wanted.

Michael McCoy: We’ve allowed people to move away from a manual process to a semi-manual process. It’s Lotus Notes Workflow and in terms of people’s ability to reconcile their expenses and get the sign-off it eases things a lot. Introducing the BlackBerry in terms of authorisation to sign off is also useful.

This is still in its infancy. From our TMC we have the BlackBerry being populated with our itinerary. Also for travel authorisation workflow we use Lotus Notes. We are currently developing in-house a function where not just the travel authorisation but many other workflows are going to have their BlackBerry version. Online booking was a major factor there. That can sometimes be handset-dependent, so we need to be careful about the state of our BlackBerrys.

Amon Cohen: Is mobile technology becoming increasingly important for corporate travel?

Jon West: We originally launched a wireless application protocol (WAP) application so that you could do all your bookings through WAP. We had 260 different handset models and the percentage uptake was negligible. We then developed a native application for BlackBerry and for iPhone and within a month we had a six-digit uptake. It is phenomenal. With one thumb you can make a booking while you are walking on the street or sitting on a train.

Clare Murphy: There are some really neat apps. Thetrainline.com has its app on the iPhone.

Jon West: For us to have that type of volume within a month is huge. It simply happened on the basis that we allowed users to put in their corporate ID so that they can do corporate bookings. That’s how it took off. It wasn’t the leisure users. The corporate bookers are the ones who suddenly need a hotel in a different place and because the phone is GPS, it knows where you are.

Sarah Makings: It’s great that you’ve got that functionality for HRS, but for my traveller, hotel is only one element. What about air, car hire and so on?

Alison Brooks: It won’t be long before the others are on there.

Amon Cohen: Now let’s turn to meetings management. What technology are you using there?

Sarah Makings: We use a venue-finding agency at KPMG and we use its tool. We’ve still got a lot of non-compliance. For us it is an immature area of spend. We use telepresence to complement our video-conferencing facilities.

Amon Cohen: Does it change your thinking about how and why you travel?

Sarah Makings: Yes, the environment is important to us as well, so we are looking to reduce our CO2 emissions and reducing air travel equates to 80 per cent of our total CO2 emissions.

Alison Brooks: We have a client whose hotel spend has reduced year on year because first they have to check whether they can do it by video. They have put in some really strict criteria.

Sarah Makings: We are trying to encourage people to use it for WebEx (web and video-conferencing), training and presentations as well as conference calls. Every member of staff has a conference call detail number card or it is stored on their laptop.

Alison Brooks: Do you put that in your travel policy to help towards cost avoidance?

Sarah Makings: Yes, and for things like the ITM’s green procurement awards you need evidence and examples of how you are reducing travel. We are honest with suppliers; for some routes I’ve told airlines there will be a reduction because of it and they are expecting it.

Michael McCoy: We have had video-conferencing for about five years plus and failure rates are rapidly decreasing due to an investment in the infrastructure.

We are also implementing high-definition interim solutions until our own Panasonic-branded solution becomes a little bit more interoperable. Last year MDs would have flown in from the headquarters from all around Europe to attend meetings, which wasn’t really necessary.

John Green: The other side is that it improves communication between remote sites. If you haven’t got the
time or money to go, but can video-conference, more communication takes place because of that.

Amon Cohen: The slogan Ikea’s travel team has to encourage people to use video-conferencing is “Meet more, travel less”, which is quite neat.

Something we have touched on is the extent to which you are integrating your management of these virtual options with the management of travel itself. Are you joining the two together strategically in policy, analysis of trip numbers and virtual meeting numbers?

Sarah Makings: In our online messaging tools we have specific dynamic messaging about whether the trip is required. There is a process that people have to go through before they can make the booking. It is the same with our TMC – it asks these questions too.

The biggest thing from our point of view is integrating all the communication. We promote travel alternatives heavily in all our newsletters. At internal meetings and roadshows we have stands, as well as allowing suppliers to promote their video-conferencing systems and the alternatives to travel.

Our corporate social responsibility team participates too; we promote video-conferencing as a way to reduce travel, from the point of view of the environment, cost and work-life balance.

Amon Cohen: Is there a guiding mind to this strategy, whether it is an individual or a committee, that looks at this holistically?

Sarah Makings: Yes. We are creating a panel of people who make these types of decisions and I will be one of them.

Michael McCoy: You mentioned policy. Within ours we state clearly that video-conferencing should be used. Employees should travel only if video-conferencing isn’t a solution.

Leadership is also very important. Our CEO is forever travelling around, obviously, but he is demanding of his local MDs in different sites that they meet him by video-conference and not travel. He demands of them that they make the necessary investment in the infrastructure to get dependable video-conferencing.

Amon Cohen: Are you able to quantify to what extent the use of virtual alternatives has reduced your travel?

Sarah Makings: It’s hard to measure it, but I do know of one company which does. It has internal charges for the use of telepresence and employees have to fill out a form for every meeting that they hold and say, “I would otherwise have travelled.” Currently we don’t have that in place. We can see the reduction in our spend before the economic decline.

Michael McCoy: We have enough reporting on admin processes at the moment and there wouldn’t be the appetite for any more. Our target for travel cost saving this year is 20 per cent, which is something that we communicate. That means typically reducing our spend on single day trips.

Jon West: There is an interesting counter to that. We’ve just put 100 people out in the field who would previously have been based in offices around the world and who are now working from home. Although they probably don’t stay away, they certainly don’t fly. Because of this the travel budget for our organisation will probably go up fivefold this year.

Our business is evolving into a relationship business as opposed to a commodity business. It’s carefully managed and you implement budgetary controls and restrictions from the beginning, which means that there is total adherence to policy.

Amon Cohen: Do you see any potential in social media?

Kathryn Bullock: Using company intranets to adopt some of these social networking tools could be powerful. Once a company understands who its prime networkers are within its organisation, if it gets them on board, they can help champion policy.

Look at the network effect and how Facebook exploded. It astounds me when I look at the stats in terms of UK companies’ usage of intranet, it’s still quite low. From the last set of figures I saw it was 20 per cent. You need to leverage it to start to build communities within business to champion new projects and get adoption of travel plans.

Amon Cohen: Does any of this sound appealing or feasible to you?

Michael McCoy: Not in an environment where social networking sites are banned.

Kathryn Bullock: I’m not thinking about Facebook here. I’m talking about the same technology, but being leveraged on your company intranet, if you have one.

Sarah Makings: We use everything on our intranet. We have some innovation and once a year there is something created on the intranet that enables everybody to go online, put in their ideas, respond to it and say whether it will or will not work. Sometimes there are prizes for the best ideas that save money, improve efficiency, change the way of working for the better and so on, but I’ve never thought of that as social media. We haven’t completely banned Facebook; however, we have a security policy on the intranet about the use of these networking types of sites.

LinkedIn is more business-oriented and we use that for recruitment. We have our own travel intranet site across Europe, so we have all our policies on there and give people an opportunity to talk to us, complain if they have problems and access online tools including competitions and newsletters, but it is not quite the same level of interaction.

Jon West: We opened up reviews of hotels. We decided to allow anybody to say whatever they wanted. We have put those into eight categories, depending on the type of booking that was made. We’ve had more than two million reviews.

Alison Brooks: I have clients who say: “I want it mandated that every time they stay they do a review because it will enable me to choose which hotels I should be having next year.” At the end of the day, if we’ve got serious problems with them, at least we know about them.

Amon Cohen: Is there not a problem – that people start being rude about the preferred hotels in the programme and you have a management challenge?

John Green: You have, but it’s a brave move because you are providing a channel to bring it out so that something can be done about it rather than leaving it to chance.

Kathryn Bullock: And it’s in your environment. It’s much better they do that than whinge on the general internet.

John Green: Or become subversive and non-compliant in terms of finding a way around it.

Amon Cohen: How do you know if there are vested interests? Isn’t that the other problem?

Jon West: Yes, that can happen, but the fact is that they have to have spent money in the hotel because they’ve come through the process.

Clare Murphy: Unlike some websites where the hoteliers have gone on and given themselves great ratings.

Sarah Makings: I don’t know about other organisations, but certainly in mine we get people who are vocal about issues if they have a bad experience. People don’t get round to doing good reviews.

Alison Brooks: It’s about making it simple. We’ve used tick boxes, so you don’t have to write anything. You can just tick good or bad and so on. That’s all you have to do.  

* The roundtable was held in February 2010