Making the Business Case for Better Travel

The most common question I get after speaking about the benefits of reducing traveler friction is “OK, we get the idea, but how are we supposed to sell this to senior management?”

Here’s the answer:

The whole idea is to balance the costs and the benefits of better business travel, right?  So that means we need a way to quantify those things, in a way that makes sense to senior management.

The good news is that there is now enough research out there to help us frame the question with some clear logic and pretty good assumptions.

Gillespie’s Travel Policy Impact Model

I’ve developed a simple – and free – approach that any travel buyer can put to work right away. It’s an Excel model (see below) that asks you to fill in 16 things.  Do that, and you’ll see the results. Your results could look like this:

“If we spend an extra $35K per road warrior to give them better quality, lower-friction trips, we’ll get back a net gain of $90K each, for an ROI of about 260%”

Credibility Is Key

Travel managers,  you’ll be able to plug 10 of the 16 data things into the Cost section pretty much off the top of your heads.  You’ll probably need help with the 6 things in the Benefits section.

A Challenge To My Travel Procurement Friends

 Is it time to think about your category goals for 2018?  Yep.

Are you hoping to somehow increase the size of your savings next year?  Of course.   Are you optimistic about meeting that goal?  Probably not.

Would you like to show senior management that you’re adding significant strategic value to the travel category? That your approach is fundamentally aligned with the needs of the business?  Therein lies my challenge.

For the last 20 years, travel procurement has measured its success by the size of its savings. Travel procurement takes the path of least resistance, happy to measure what’s easiest – ticket prices, room rates, TMC transaction fees, and the all-important discount.

This traditional cost-focused goal is no longer sufficient.  It’s not strategic, and it isn’t sustainable. Travel procurement needs a bigger, bolder goal.

Step 1: Understand The Cost of Traveler Friction

A Big Win No One Is Talking About

Two years ago I wrote that travel managers face two paths.

One path is to keep doing what you do today: jumping through endless supplier meetings, putting out fires around traveler service issues, continually hacking away towards inbox zero… In short, doing all those things that add short-term tactical value.

The other path leads to adding higher, more strategic value by focusing on travel’s broader business impact. I’ll preach about taking this path at GBTA in Boston on July 17th.

One area along this path that I think is rife with opportunity is non-employee travel. Think recruiting trips for on-site interviews, new-hire training, or guest visits such as speakers, partners, or customers.

Most all the current corporate travel tools and systems were built for current employees. If you worry that your own travelers don’t enjoy that experience, how do you think your non-employee travelers feel?

Relationship Advice for Road Warriors

Surely a ton of travel creates unique strains for road warriors and their families.

Fortunately, these problems are fairly predictable, and can be managed with a bit of planning, effort and honest communication.  If you know a road warrior or two, read on, as they may well benefit from the sage advice from Megan Bearce, author, licensed marriage and family therapist, and wife of a road warrior.

I connected with Megan on the issue of traveler friction, something she knows well, especially as it impacts couples and families.  She’s written a terrific book on this subject, and offers the following practical advice.

A Guest Post From Megan Bearce:

I am happy to report that whether you are a road warrior or a “super commuter,” (employees who travels 90 miles or more to their job), physical separation doesn’t have to mean emotional distance.  Below are three strategies from my book, Super Commuter Couples: Staying Together When A Job Keeps You Apart, to help your relationship thrive despite being apart.

1) Coming home:

People assume that reuniting after days on the road would be exciting, but in reality this

What’s The Real Goal of a Travel Program?

 

Quick – name three metrics that travel managers care most about…and no, you can’t say savings, savings and savings.

Savings, for sure, maybe followed by discounts and policy compliance, or average ticket price/room/car rate.    These are time-tested, industry-accepted, common-sense metrics that are the foundation for status-quo management of the travel category.

(Going to GBTA’s Convention? See a related meet-up note at the end of this post)

Before you reject my call to demote these traditional metrics, consider the maxim “Measure what matters”.  Note that it isn’t “Measure what’s laying around, looking like it matters”.  It’s not “Measure what we’ve always measured”.

It’s the “what matters” part that’s the key.  That, and an evolved view of travel management’s mission.

Shouldn’t the goal of managing travel be to create the most value from whatever the travel budget is?  To create the biggest business impact, net of the cost?  Sure…which means we need to think about measuring said impact.

4 Services for Reducing Traveler Friction

Reducing Travel Friction

Innovation and traveler friction are popular topics for you folks, so here are a few quick profiles of new ways to make life easier for travelers.

DUFL – Allows travelers to travel without luggage.  A mashup of FedEx and your favorite Downton Abbey butler.  DUFL stocks a private closet with your travel clothes, and sends them to your hotel in advance of your arrival.  You leave the DUFL suitcase at the hotel upon checkout, and DUFL retrieves it, cleans and repacks your clothes, ready for your next trip.  Yes, there is an app for that.  More about DUFL here.

Expensify – Automatically, and near- instantly, reimburses travelers for their on-the-road expenses. Snap a photo of the receipt, and the expense reporting tool automatically cues it for payment the next day.  It’s hard to imagine making expense reimbursement any easier.  More about this feature here. Hat tip to BTN for the coverage.

FlyAnotherDay – Helps travelers and planners avoid trips to major cities around the globe during city-wide events.  An easy way to check a destination’s potential for travel congestion.  A new service with affordable pricing that solves a pesky problem.

What3Words – not really a travel app, but keep reading…this app makes finding places really easy, especially those places without a street address.  Imagine your travelers wanting to meet on a campus for a recruiting trip, or at a ferry point, or an oil rig.  This service makes it easy to identify any location on the globe using three words.  Interesting implications for travel risk management, yes?

 I have no commercial ties to any of these firms; just a fan of their efforts.

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Travel Managers, Choose Your Career Path

You travel managers have very challenging jobs.  You also have two very stark career paths in front of you. Let’s start with where you’re at today:

You’re managing a complicated and ever-changing mix of problems.  One hour it’s all about traveler service issues, the next it’s a rash of technology speed bumps, followed by constant demands for reporting cost savings.

You get sucked into endless supplier meetings, do your best to reconcile messy data points, and pray that the new travel policy proposal gets past the latest stakeholder review checkpoint –  all while trying to stay on top of 200 e-mails a day.   There’s more, but this makes the point.

A big tip of the hat, folks – you’re doing important work across a variety of disciplines, with many stakeholders ready and willing to critique your results.  It’s a pretty unique job in many ways, and chances are good that you enjoy most of it.

But you need to ask what’s the future for a travel manager.  What type of role will you hold in 3 years, 5 years, 10 years?  Will ever-more automation and ever-better analytics put your current job to pasture?

A Better Way to Manage Road Warriors, and Their Costs

You road warriors are a hardy bunch, aren’t you?

You spend over a hundred hours a year on planes, take trips on short notice, cross too many time zones, lose sleep, gain weight, get up way early and come home late, and give up more than your share of weekends.

All while being squeezed by travel policies that leave you shaking your head, wondering if the people who approved these policies really, truly understand how hard it is to be a heavy-duty road warrior.

The Travel Friction Concept

Let’s call all this wear and tear you’re taking on “travel friction“.  You get it, right?  The more trips you take, the tougher those trips are, the more you get burned out by being on the road.

Fun fact: Real road warriors, those in the top 10% of all travelers, absorb

Why TMCs Need a Dramatically Different Sales Approach

Ever notice how Travel Management Companies (TMCs) have a hard time selling their value?

It’s not a complicated value proposition.  “We’ll help you book travel at low prices and help your travelers on the road, so you’ll save money and sleep better.”

That’s a pretty easy benefit statement to grasp, right?  So that’s not really the problem.

Two Big Problems

TMCs compete on the wrong metric, and they sell to the wrong people.

Traveler Friction, Part 1: Three Key Benchmarks

Road warriors are a hardy bunch.  tClara’s data on more than 100,000 travelers shows that each month road warriors often spend more than ten nights away from home, and spend more than 30 hours on planes.  Month after month, that adds up to a lot of wear and tear.

Most road warriors can handle it – for a while.  But sooner or later, all that travel-related wear and tear (aka traveler friction) builds up, and then the traveler burns out.

Burning out a road warrior is incredibly expensive, especially if the traveler is on the road producing revenue or serving high-value customers.  So it makes sense to look hard at what causes traveler friction, how it impacts a business, and what should done about it.

Benchmarking Traveler Friction’s 3 Key Drivers

It’s a simple equation:

Traveler Friction = Trip Quantity x (Travel Footprint + Trip Discomfort)

tClara has applied its patent-pending Trip Friction™ algorithm to over 500,000 trips from 100,000 travelers around the globe.  This means that firms can now objectively understand what their travelers are experiencing.