As with many companies, you may have cut back your travel due to budget restrictions and the down economy. Or, maybe your current travel program isn’t structured to achieve maximum savings. Either way, now is a good time to restart your travel program and retool your policies and processes to leverage savings.
As the economy does improve and demand and revenues begin to increase, you will realize the immediate savings benefits that will allow you to return to the road and drive your sales and revenue.
“If you’re not efficiently and prudently traveling and meeting face-to-face with clients, you won’t experience those results and may lose clients to your competitors,” says John L. Sturm, executive director of sales and marketing with Professional Travel Inc. “Even though you’re trying to reduce expenses, you still need responsible travel to strengthen relationships and secure new business. The question is: ‘How effectively have you driven costs out of the process through policy and managed travel standards of practice?’”
Smart Business spoke with Sturm about how to make changes to your travel program and make sure you’re managing it wisely.
What signs in your company point to the need to restart your corporate travel program?
It depends on the individual business and its current situation. The economy will certainly impact how much travel you’re doing, based on your overall needs and sales. Companies fall into several different categories. There are those with very specific and well-managed travel programs who are already taking advantage of the savings benefits, but the economy dictated the cuts. The other end of the scale are companies not truly managing travel, relying on their travelers to make the purchasing decisions. These decisions may be good for the travelers but are not necessarily in the company’s best interest. A lot of companies in this situation took deeper cuts and cut back significantly on travel, missing the available savings through a structured and negotiated program. By implementing a fully managed program, they could have saved 12 to 17 percent without missing a trip.
As the economy is starting to come back, we’re seeing a much greater emphasis to take advantage of opportunities to develop an overall travel strategy. The focus should be on correctly managing travel to realize all available cost savings. Few, if any, are realized when left to the individual traveler.
How can you make necessary changes to travel programs that didn’t work in the past?
That is the key point behind managed travel. Managing travel is not about creating undo stress and pressure for your travelers — it’s about establishing parameters and guidelines that will enable you to maximize your overall travel savings.
You can do this by:
- Integrating your corporate culture
- Developing a travel program that establishes specific controls that will enable you to take advantage of industry discounts
- Aggregating travel through one source
- Analyzing data to improve efficiencies
A travel management company will do all the negotiating for you, including airlines, car and hotel. Aggregating your purchasing and buying through specific vendors will dramatically improve savings.