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

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.

KPI Toolkit for Travel Managers

Updated Feb 2017

Travel KPIs and benchmarks have not evolved much in the last 20 years.

Here’s a fresh, much more strategic look at what travel managers should be using to measure the success of their programs.

Start with an understanding of what business travelers need to do their jobs well.  That’s the Hierarchy of Needs, shown in blue.

Hard to argue that the ultimate goal of any business trip is to have a positive business impact, right?  So if that outcome depends on getting the road warrior through each level of needs, then travel managers should be working hard to ensure those needs are well met.

And that means measuring proxies for these levels to show how well said management is going.  Measure these KPIs, mange them well, and your travel program will achieve much greater impact for your business.  I’ll write about these travel benchmarks in more detail soon; for now, the basic ideas:

Risk Score combines the program’s overall readiness for managing travel risks, and the destination risk associated with the program’s travel footprint. Scale the results where high risk and poor readiness result in a high number.  Management will want to see this travel KPI driven down.

Trip Quality combines the quality scores for the flights taken and hotels booked by road warriors. Assign high quality scores to non-stop flights booked in first class, and low quality scores to flights with multiple stops and booked in economy class.  Same direction for hotels – the more stars, the higher the hotel quality score.

Road Warrior Attrition measures the annual rate at which the road warrior workforce loses its people.  Attrition is a very common HR metric…just need to tell HR who your road warriors are. Management probably wants to see this rate decline over time.

Trip Scrap Rate is the opposite of Travel ROI.  Here, we’re measuring the percentage of road warrior trips that in hindsight, the road warriors believe were not worthwhile.  The average is about 12%…clearly worth managing this number downward, right?

The most important of these four KPIs is Trip Quality, because it is a choice, a dial, that management can turn up or down.  Changing trip quality will affect travel prices in one direction, and will drive the other three KPIs in the other direction.

Airfare Benchmarks Grow Up

Please don’t believe that having an old-school airfare benchmark from a peer set is going to tell you anything meaningful. Comparing your $555 average ticket price (ATP) to a benchmark’s $500 ATP is worthless…unless it’s been created from exactly your markets.

The Air Clarity airfare benchmark solves this problem, and goes two steps farther. Not only does it build a truly market-matched airfare benchmark at the overall program level, it breaks down the program’s percentage gap into two critical pieces:

The Product Mix gap measures the difference in airfare product features your program bought, versus those product features bought by the benchmark’s travelers. Product features include cabin, number of stops, days advance purchase, Saturday night stays, etc. Essentially, the Product Mix gap reveals how your travel policies and culture compares to your market-matched peers…an essential insight for policy-based savings estimation.

The Price gap measures the overall weighted difference in airfare prices, measured at the smallest practical level – same city pair, same airline, same booking class, e.g., Y, B, M, H, etc.  This single metric instantly reveals the potential for sourcing-based savings.

Airfare Benchmarks in Price per Hour

For a much more executive-friendly way to discuss the cost of air travel, forget price per mile…really, what does 25 cents a mile mean to anyone not in the aviation industry?

See this post for a range of price per hour benchmarks in short haul (mostly domestic) markets and long haul (international) markets. The Air Clarity Price per Hour benchmarks also come by cabin…great context for those executive briefings.

KPI Toolkit for Travel Managers, as of 2012

Back in 2012, four of us took up Paul Tilstone‘s challenge to create a set of Key Performance Indicators for travel category managers.  Nicolas Borel, Torsten Kriedt, James Westgarth and I have been working on this project for quite a few months now.

We settled on twenty-one KPIs, complete with definitions and likely data sources.  Of course, you can’t have a KPI Toolkit without an Excel file, right?  So we designed an easy self-scoring worksheet that allows you to customize the weights of each KPI to suit your interests. Our KPIs focus on transient travel – the groups and meetings side was out of scope from the get-go.

Folks, these KPIs are suggestions – they are not industry-agreed standards.  They are meant as a thoughtful starting point for considering which KPIs are best for your travel program.

Updated: Here are the two files we created:

2012 KPI Reference Guide for GBTA This PDF describes the 21 KPIs in detail, and provides more information about the scope and limitations of this effort.

KPI Scoring Wizard This Excel file contains a simple worksheet that allows custom weighting and scoring of each KPI.

GBTA (Global Business Travel Association) members have access to the KPI toolkit via the GBTA website.  The KPI toolkit is but one ; many other valuable resources are available to GBTA members. If you are not yet a member, you may join GBTA here.

Here is a whitepaper from Advito, BCD’s consulting unit, on the role of KPIs in a strategically managed travel program: Strategic Travel Program KPIs from Advito

On a related note, here’s a post on the pitfalls of using KPIs.

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