2. When you call the travel agent 99% of all opportunities to save money have been lost.
The quickest and easiest way to save money on travel is not to travel in the first place.
How daft is that, I hear. Not as much as you may think. You see, you can have all the booking tools, management systems and other bells and whistles in the world but if the journey was not really necessary then it is all a waste of money. Saving money does not start by looking at the fare, it starts by looking at why people travel in the first place. This means looking closer at your organisation and their motives behind each travel "event". Why was that event required? What did it achieve in terms of benefit for the company? Could a task have been accomplished by someone who was already there or who is going a day later? Would the whole company have dissolved into chaos if you had not been there on that day at that time? Would a telephone call or a video conference call been possible?
Perform the following excercise: Take out three or four travel events at random from last month and get the person who travelled to answer the following:
1. "Why did you go and what positive benefit did your visit bring to the company?"
2. "How much revenue did this travel event generate?"
Most travel usually falls into one of three categories. Repair, Maintain, Develop. There is a fourth category, which costs business an awful lot of money and which must be eradicated as soon as possible - "Hat Drop".
There is little you can do about "Repair". If you have a problem occasioned by something breaking down, then someone has to go a fix it. And be quick about it! It is a cost that has to be covered and whereas there may be an internal discussion about how reliable your firm's kit is, it is not something we need to identify as a major revenue saver.
Maintain and Develop are categories where we can start to look for savings.
Maintenance usually means being on a circuit or cycle of events and as such can be planned in advance. You should, hopefully, have a good relationship with your client. The worst way of arranging maintenance is to go somewhere, come back and then go somewhere else. The way air travel works is that many places are "thrown in" with others and in other cases, places only a short distance apart can have a significant effect on the fare. This is where a travel agent comes in. Knowledge of how things work means that an agent can couple places together to effect the most efficient way of covering the calls. It is also a good example of the partnership at work.
I have a client who has to make many call cycles each year and we work out the best way between us. Firstly, they supply a "raw" list of where they have to go. This list is then carved up into workable itineraries, taking into consideration the many relevant factors such as weekends, specific date requirements - also taken into consideration is "where" works with "where". The suggested itineraries go back for approval and then the fare combinations are looked at. There is a lot of intuitive travel industry knowledge that has to go into this process, but note that fares only come into the equation at a very late point. These itineraries and events are not booked - they evolve.
This type of travel cannot - cannot - be done by any one airline these days and for this sort of job the internet and booking tools are useless.
Save Money on Business Travel - Part 2
This style of itinerary planning has a different way of approach for the purpose of cost. This is not reviewed from the point of view of how much per flight. It is looked at from the standpoint of what can be achieved given a ticket cost. For example, let us say that you have 4 calls to make on the Indian sub-continent. The cost of going for 3 calls, 5 or even 6 calls is probably the same. The ticket will cost, say £1,500. Now, if we can get an extra call into the itinerary and the ticket costs £1.550 we have achieved a significant saving. If we had to go back for the last remaining call, we would have wasted about £1,500. The focus here is finding a "per call" budget without reference to anything else.
Sales development travel is very similar. You would be surprised how many people spend hours on planning their presentations and the meeting without a thought for how they are going to get there. The latter bit just "happens".
One of these days, someone will have the answer as to why everything has to start at 09:00 hours. Not all meetings, especially sales calls last all day. A journey for a single call could be orientated towards, say, just after lunch. Even just before lunch - for the "networking" bit - on short haul flights, does not require people to be on the 06:45 to Amsterdam. Just like trains, the airlines have a rush hour. Ask in your firm how many people know when they can use their Travelcard for a cheap train to London (or Manchester or Newcastle or Aberdeen) and then ask them the time of the first cheap flight to Amsterdam.
For an organisation to save travel dollars, there has to be a culture of saving. Everyone has to be on board from the President down. Everyone has to be willing to join in. You can regulate travel policy until the cows come home, but if you do not have an instilled culture of saving, people will regard policy as something that has to be bent. True, self booking tools may save something here and there but as they say in Rugby "You win matches by scoring tries, not kicking goals" so it is in travel. You save money by getting rid of travel events and by making full use of every travel Dollar that you have to spend, not by shaving off £10 from the odd trip. If the trip could have been avoided, then even £1.00 is too much. Hence my statement, once you call the travel agent or go on-line to book the flight, most of the opportunities to save have been lost.
The biggest sin, the mostly costly and usually the most popular event is "Hat Drop" travel. This sort of travel cost your company a mint. The airlines love it and they screw you for it. Unfortunately for the travel manager, the higher up the organisational tree you go, the more prevalent it is. It is usually combined with two other factors, the "Travel Policy applies to everyone in this company with the exception of Me" syndrome and "What? Travel Policy? Do you know who I am?" effect. First off, no company is going to save money unless the man at the top plays ball - or at least attends the match. This does not mean that your company President has to travel in cattle class, it means that one seeks to have those at the top lead by example. If the boss has to go to Australia from the UK, does he go British Airways Business Class or does he go in the same class on Singapore Airlines? Both go to the same place, both have lie flat beds, both arrive roughly the same time. It is just that one costs twice as much as the other! The difference is that to save half the fare - and we are talking about £3,000 here - the boss has to walk about 300 yards. Let me just spell that our for you in case you missed it -£1,000 for every 100 yards walked.
Hat Drop travel is also the result of missed planning opportunities or is occasioned by travel having to fit around all other events in the executives busy diary. It is not a requirement that even a quick trip across the Channel has to be planned around flight timetables - it would be silly to suggest that - but certainly on long haul flights a lot is at stake for want of a little agent involvement.
This should be the area of maximum focus. Hat drop travel is always very expensive and if you prevent even 20% of hat drop travel events, the effect on the travel budget is highly significant. Try taking a months' travel events and place each event into their respective reason box. Clues may be given by length of time prior to travel, the event was booked. These must be closely analysed and attempts made to move these events into another category. At the same time check that no "maintenance" events have become "hat drop"!
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