Black Car Cost Control

Jeff LaFave, founder and CEO of SummitQwest, has mastered the art of controlling black car costs for his corporate clients.  If you’re keen to see 15% savings in this category, read on…

A big pain in black car spend management is dealing with messy invoices from lots of suppliers. There can be dozens of price-related fields and factors.  Lots of rides need to be charged back to clients or business units.  Rides may not comply with travel policies…like the guy who took a black car to and from work for a year, yes, you guessed it – outside of company policy.

SummitQwest tackled this messy problem by creating SummitGround, a standardized black car invoicing platform. It makes a lot of sense for these reasons:

ProcureApp’s Clever Compliance Tool

Disclosure: I’ve served  ProcureApp as an unpaid advisor.

Procurement folks hate undiscounted spend.  They’ll love ProcureApp.  Why? Because it detects when a buyer (think traveler) has wandered onto a non-approved supplier’s website. When that happens, a friendly message pops up.

“Pardon me, old chap.  Couldn’t help noticing that you’re on Brand.com’s site.  Not really an approved supplier, are they?  Tsk, tsk. Why don’t we take a nice stroll over to our approved travel site, and do our shopping and booking over there, shall we?”

Beautiful.  A timely message displayed to a traveler at a critical step in the path of non-compliance. Complete with a link to the preferred site.

Forecast for Travel Buying Tools

Are there any better ways to buy business travel, other than the standard RFP/tender?

That’s the question I took on in Lisbon a couple of weeks ago.  This slide summarizes my views on four alternatives.

With a few exceptions, it’s not a sunny outlook.

The good news is that reverse auctions continue

Cutting Taxi Costs and CO2

You’re in a long line outside an airport, waiting for a taxi and wondering how many people in front of you are going to the same place.  Wouldn’t it be great if you could pair up?  Save time, money and reduce carbon emissions – what’s not to like about that idea?

Well, there are a handful of websites that will help you do just that.  The one that first caught my eye is Taxi2 (www.taxi.to).  Your travelers