The Blank Slate:
Starting—or Starting
Over—with Managed
Travel

“They weren’t getting any benefits, there wasn’t really any support for travelers when things go wrong or guidance around how to do things correctly,” said Amy Hunke, recently hired by a Pennsylvania-based manufacturing firm with travel spend that tops out the midsize segment. Even at that level of spend, Hunke was brought in as global travel and events manager to implement a managed travel program for the first time at the firm.

“The first time you have a situation where a C-Suite is stranded, somebody is robbed or somebody has a medical injury on travel…” she said trailing off. “They realized that they needed to be moved to a managed platform.”

The unmanaged travel environment at Hunke’s company also had led to duplicative purchases, especially when employees weren’t aware that travel insurance was already covered.

There’s also the question of equity across the organization for an activity as visible as business travel, said Hunke. Often, when an organization isn’t formally managing travel, individual managers approve trips for their team members in a siloed fashion, and that can be a problem.

“If you really think about it, most managers don't really know the incentives of [the travel industry]. They kind of look at the bottom line and they're like, ‘Okay, well, that's what it costs,’” Hunke said. “A manager in an unmanaged travel program might be like, ‘$300 a night for a hotel, that seems okay because it's basically New York City, and then you have Manager B that's like ‘$300 a night for a hotel? Absolutely not!’”

An effective travel policy begins to address such issues. While many small and midsize companies implement travel policy as “guidelines,” Hunke said it was important with her program to go further than that. Policy should set standards upfront: The traveler must use an approved booking tool, for example, or they may have maximum spending amounts for accommodation and that policy gets configured into a booking tool that will throw flags when the traveler books a flight or accommodation that goes beyond those caps.

That said, not all travel experiences have to be equal. If there are levels of travelers who have access to additional services and amenities, it’s best to define in what situations and for whom those amenities kick in, and not leave them to be applied inconsistently. Similarly, different markets may have different needs and, therefore, creating exactly the same policy in both markets may actually create inequities. For example, to mandate an online booking tool in a market where the most convenient travel content cannot be accessed through that tool won’t create an equitable program across the company’s employees. So, yes, implementing a managed travel program can get complex.

Starting from Scratch

At the very top of the spending scale for a midsize travel program, which BTN defines at around $15M in U.S. air spend, Hunke went a traditional route of working with a large travel management company BCD Travel and implementing Concur as the company’s preferred booking tool. The manufacturing company is two years into the process of sourcing preferred suppliers and launching the program, which went live in some locations in April and will continue to roll out.

Not every midsize travel program—a segment that can be very diverse in its requirements—will decide that preferred airline and hotel contracts are accessible for them or that they are best served by a mega-agency. So they go a different direction.  

Eliquent Life Sciences business operations manager Patrice Mistretta is putting together a new travel program for the company that will launch in about six months. Eliquent spends about $2 million annually on travel and has about 400 employees. Mistretta, however, used to manage travel for just 200 employees. Times have changed: Her previous company joined with four others, and she now has the challenge of unifying a travel management program across five separate entities that were pulled together under the Eliquent brand early this year.

Of the constituent organizations, two already had managed travel programs prior to the rebrand, but three did not.

Eliquent contracted with midsize travel specialist Corporate Traveler and switched from the legacy Concur booking tool to the TMC’s proprietary tool Melon, based on the UX which she called “prettier” and “more intuitive” for travelers. It was an important change that pre-empted other strategic program decisions.

From a policy perspective Mistretta is building a program “that is not black and white…something that can be flexible, [but] something that sets ground rules for safety and comfort of the travelers,” she said. As part of that process, she’s attempting to look at the two travel programs that did exist and understand how their nuances supported the different businesses. Also, were there ways in which unmanaged travel also benefitted the three companies that didn’t have rules?

It's a challenge to figure it all out, she said, and it’s a process that is still in progress. But she’s been meeting with company executives across all divisions on a regular basis to gather information and requirements. As a result, she has come to a few solid conclusions: Overall, the program should trust travelers more, enable them with better tools and spend time on education so the company can maximize the value of the program.

“We want to look at the setup and the functionality of what we're being provided,” she said. “If it's a system, for example, can this system be molded to fit our business—and will it flex with us … if we are looking at other finance systems and we know it all needs to work together to function properly. If a [partner] can’t do that, we can’t bring it in.” Mistretta detailed a virtual payment strategy that, specifically, needed to be met for the Eliquent program and talked about the numerous systems that really need to fit together for the program to function properly.

Even as Mistretta puts all that into place, she knows it will be moot if travelers don’t understand the opportunity and the value.

“There are a lot of employees who travel [for Eliquent] who don’t know that I exist or that Corporate Traveler exists, or that there are multiple ways to get travel booked. Multiple ways to find resolutions if something happens [on a trip] or you need to make changes,” she said. “Education is going to be very important, so that’s something that I’m focusing on.”  

Thankfully, she said, the fact that the company is making travel easier and providing more support should make travelers more comfortable and make the education process easier as well.

A Generation of Change

The Eliquent story is in line with how more SMEs are needing to look at their travel programs, according to a number of industry observers.

Younger users—particularly Gen Z and Millennials—require self-service travel options in their personal lives and are demanding better user experiences from enterprise travel platforms as well. While a more mature corporate soldier may be more content to follow policies, a new generation will be more adept at experimenting with digital e-commerce platforms and won’t tolerate a travel program UX that is below grade.

That was nearly the exact admonition given to Lorna Darling, senior sourcing manager at software firm Thryv, when the CEO about a year ago said to her, “give me a tool that works better, and then we can start to enforce this.”

The company, which was an early mover in managed travel, is now in the process of changing travel agencies—from a global mega agency to Solutions Travel—because the technology system used by the larger agency repeatedly failed the program.

“Their portal was horrific,” she said, especially with the recent fragmentation of airline content into a host of different channels over the past two years. The result, for many companies, has driven more travelers to go outside of the travel program to search for airfares, convenient travel times and personalization options that fit their individual preferences.

Thryv is planning to complete the transition to Solutions Travel—a TMC launched just 18 months ago on Spotnana technology—by September, but it wasn’t an easy decision. Darling was wary of going with a new provider operating in an environment where innovative travel apps and solutions have popped up and shut down in quick succession. “I don’t want to be used as a guinea pig,” she said.

But Darling was guided in the decision-making process by consultant Grant Caplan, who encouraged her to keep an open mind and explore the new options becoming available to the SME buyer. “I remembered the RFP process from years ago being really difficult, and I wasn’t looking forward to that,” she said. “But the consultant helped tremendously with the RFP,” ensuring the Thryv procurement team was asking focused questions to scrutinize content and service capabilities for air bookings and other elements, as well as traveler experience demands. With her previous TMC, Darling said she “was lucky to still have a job,” given the way the account was handled.

Today, she’s excited to be going in another direction and was reassured regarding the staying power of Solutions Travel, when the founder and CEO Mark Walton engaged directly with the Thryv team to win the business. Plus, she reached out to get industry references and found a host of individuals willing to vouch for Walton's personal competency and commitment.

“It's pretty cool,” said Darling, to be a part of something new and exciting in the industry, especially with the quick implementation times that have been promised. It’s just not the same process she remembers from years ago. “It’s cool to see what it can do. It really doesn't seem to have any issues with booking anything, even with the airlines. … It’s all new technology, so I took a chance.”