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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Why Data Predicting Trumps Data Reporting

Quick – name a travel metric that your CFO would pay a lot of money to predict reasonably well.

Next year’s travel savings? Maybe. Next year’s travel spend? Maybe.  But he won’t pick your firm’s future travel policy compliance rate, or next year’s average airfare, or your traveler’s future satisfaction with your online booking tool.

My point is that while firms spend a lot of money on travel data reporting, the core value that those pretty dashboards deliver is not very high – not in the grand scheme of your firm’s business.

Here’s why: Data reports are the result of the 20th-century management dictum “Measure what matters”.

Within the boundaries of a travel program there are dozens of things that matter.  And so we’ve figured out how to measure them. In order to report them.  In order to manage them.

But all those dials and gauges and stop lights really do is simply give you signals.  Signals that you have to interpret to keep your travel program  between the white lines of your side of the road.

What those travel dashboards don’t do is tell you how to get to a better travel program.

They can’t, because they have two big flaws:

• Data reports are stuck in the past
• Travel data reports are stuck in the world of travel

So that’s the data-driven solution to getting better travel programs – deal with the future, and deal with data well outside of travel.

Enter Predictive Analytics

The key is linking travel’s impact to business outcomes.  Outcomes that matter on a much bigger scale, like sales, customer satisfaction, employee attrition, health/safety costs, etc.

This will fundamentally change the way you view and manage a travel program.

Instead of seeking to minimize travel costs, you’ll be trying to maximize sales, or perhaps minimize employee turnover – by putting a travel program in place that clearly contributes to those goals.

If sales are trending down, or employee turnover is trending up, what should you, the travel manager do to help fix these problems?

Obviously, you’ll need some new lights on your dashboard – lights driven by data from Sales and HR.  More importantly, you’ll need to know how to impact those non-travel metrics.

That’s where predictive analytics comes in.  You need to have a data-driven understanding of how things like cabin policy and hotel tiers impact bigger, non-travel metrics like employee productivity, health and safety, and attrition.

You need to predict with confidence that by changing a variable in the travel policy, it will cost $X and improve the non-travel metric by Y%.

You’ll do this in one of two ways.  If your travel program is big enough, you’ll be able to mine your own data and build these models.  If your program is too small to offer enough data, you’ll depend on benchmarks and case studies from the larger firms.

Either way, you’ll find yourself importing non-travel data into your travel dashboards, and exporting pro-active, fact-based advice on how to drive to your firm’s bigger goals.

Management theories evolve.  Dictums change.  It’s time to move on from measuring what matters to predicting what matters.

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A Brighter Way to Measure Travel’s Impact

For the amount of money firms spend on travel, surely they’d like to know the impact. There is an incredibly practical – and pretty easy –  way to answer this question.

Forget about ROI – it’s too theoretical.  Skip Big Data – it’s irrelevant.  Instead, focus on what matters and what’s measurable.

Think about the issue this way: At what point is too much travel counter-productive?

Spend too much time on planes and you’re not selling.  Cross too many time zones and you’re not giving clients such good advice, or making such good decisions on that oil rig. Take too many redeyes in coach and you’re seeing a doctor for a cranky neck or worse, deep vein thrombosis.

It’s about cause and effect; travel and impact. So the approach is simple.

First, identify the road warriors in your firm, and their business unit leaders.  Ask those business unit leaders which business metrics matter, and might be affected by too much travel, and are measurable.  Think sales, hours billed, customer satisfaction, safety, etc.

Go to HR, and ask which HR metrics matter, and might be affected by too much travel, and are measurable.  Think absenteeism, engagement, disability costs, retention, etc.

Now use your travel data to find a comparable group of employees that has done much less travel than your road warrior group.  So now you have a cohort of low-travel employees and a cohort of high-travel employees.

We’re almost there.  With a bit of analytical muscle, measure each cohort’s average result on each metric.  Then compare the two groups, testing for statistical differences. Something like this, perhaps:

Voila!  You now have a fact-driven analysis of travel’s impact.  The impact on your business, and the impact on your people. The implications will be clear.

Too much turnover, absenteeism and disability costs among your high-travel group?  Cut back their travel workload and/or loosen your travel policies for the road warriors.

No meaningful differences between the two groups?  Your travel policies are probably fine, but then what is all that extra, possibly excessive, travel really doing for your firm?

Either way, having these facts gives travel managers, HR executives and business leaders a clear-eyed view of travel’s impact.  Making solid business cases for changing travel workloads, travel budgets and travel policies is now ever so much easier.

The best part?  Travel category managers get to lead on this issue.  For you folks that are frustrated by delivering diminishing returns from mature sourcing and policy compliance, you should be first in line to drive this type of study in your organization.

For those interested in jump-starting a travel impact study, tClara and I can help.  We can quickly score your travelers’ Trip Friction™ levels, create the cohorts, and benchmark your firm’s travel intensity to those in our database.

I’ll be at the ACTE Global Conference in Miami at the end of this month, and hope to connect with many of you there.

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Identifying Travel-related Retention Risks

Who can say when a traveler has reached that dreary destination of travel burnout?

It’s a very individual issue, yes?  For some, it may take years of constant hopping from terminal to taxi, while others may arrive after a few weeks of  run-of-the-mill trips, but are suffering the consequences of way too many problems piling up at home.

I knew I was in travel burnout land when, after a few months of intense travel, the sight of my suitcase made me cringe.

Fortunately, there’s a better way to identify travelers at risk of burnout, without having to flash pictures of carry-ons in front of them and look for signs of dread.

My firm, tClara, is scoring traveler itineraries with Trip Friction™ points.  The goal is to create a proxy for the wear and tear travelers incur during their trips.

Why bother?  Because all that travel-related wear and tear eventually creates real costs.  Productivity costs.  Health care and even disability costs.  Lower employee engagement levels.  And eventually the toughest one – employee turnover.

Our industry needs a good metric, a new KPI, to shine a light on this hidden cost of too much travel. Without such a metric, I don’t see how you can truly claim to optimize a travel program…but that’s another story.  Here’s our approach to measuring traveler wear and tear:

Road Warrior Burnout: A Worthy Problem

Too much travel can cause anybody a load of stress.   Exhibit A is Brad Feld, one of Silicon Valley’s best-known angel/venture capitalists.  He lives in Colorado and was traveling 50-75% of the time.   He hit a wall.  Knew he couldn’t keep it up and still lead an emotionally healthy life.

His solution?  He quit traveling for business – cold turkey.  The Harvard Business Review interviewed him here, and Brad writes about it here.   Not traveling seems to be working for him.

The question is, how many of your firm’s road warriors are in danger of hitting this kind of wall?  The consequences can’t be good.

An Alarming “What If”

Imagine if the top ten percent of your frequent travelers called a long-term strike on business travel, like Brad Feld did.  What would happen to your customer relationships,  business development, staff development, collaboration, innovation, etc, etc.? Not to mention the cost of replacing those no-more-travelers  with folks who will travel a lot (or so they say).

What Are The Signs?

Surely your frequent travelers make up some, maybe much of your firm’s top-rated talent.  So who is watching for the early warning signs of traveler burnout?  Who even knows what those signs are?

And if you see those early warning signs, what’s the right response – less travel? Better quality or less stressful travel? Travel recovery days? Dinner for two on the company’s dime?

Who Owns The Problem?