From sourcing a select portfolio of suppliers to ensuring travel policy compliance, taking a practical approach to internal processes can go a long way in keeping your bottom line - as well as your travellers – safe and well.
When it comes to monitoring travel spend, hotels make up a significant proportion of the overall travel programme, which in many cases can be over 50 per cent. Yet, while considering cost reduction strategies, companies are often so focused on air travel that they overlook the enormous op that accommodation can offer in terms of savings and improved efficiencies.
From sourcing a select portfolio of suppliers to ensuring travel policy compliance, taking a practical approach to internal processes can go a long way in keeping your bottom line - as well as your travellers – safe and well.
- Establish how much is being spent – and where it’s going
Before you can make the right long-term decisions, it’s important to have a clear picture of your company’s hotel programme life-cycle, including the overall travel spend.
Even with mandated policies and preferred booking channels in place, the prospect of leakage can be very real with so many suppliers to manage and such a wide range of booking methods at employees’ fingertips. By working with your Travel Management Company (TMC) you can undertake a comprehensive review of your current outlay, including sourcing and proposals, a hotel audit, compliance reporting, analysis of any existing programme and peer benchmarking. Collectively this offers a clear visibility of all areas of hotel spend, highlighting key trends and behaviours.
Armed with this information you’ll be best placed to work out where the potential cost savings and improvements could come from and where your priorities should lie.
- Streamline your hotel programme to secure the best deals
By consolidating the number of hotels and chains your business uses you can leverage your organisation’s travel profile to your full advantage.
But being able to negotiate more competitive rates on your behalf isn’t the only benefit of working with a TMC. Another key objective of a reduced list of preferred hotels – on a global as well as local level - is to use your buying power to bring cost-savings to high volume locations as well as more infrequently visited ones.
What’s more, by increasing your engagement with a more manageable number of suppliers, you can also guarantee rate parity across all operating divisions and generate value-added benefits.
- Bring all your hotel programme resources together in one place
Employees are less likely to go it alone if you can demonstrate how your hotel booking system makes their working life easier.
When creating your bespoke travel portal, your TMC will integrate all the essential elements of business travel, from rates and policies to access to the hotel directory, creating a seamless booking process. Of course, having a centralised travel management system works both ways too - simplifying hotel requests and expense reconciliation, while improving the safety and security of your travellers by allowing you to see, at a glance, where your people are at any one time.
- Reinforce the value to the individual users – as well as the wider company
Having the best system in town is next to redundant if your employees continue to travel off-piste.
Once you’ve worked with your TMC to automate the internal booking process and tighten your travel policy, the next crucial step is to ensure the benefits are widely communicated to each individual user to increase compliance.
If you consider that, on average, ATPI clients enjoy savings of between 10-15 per cent on their hotel programmes simply by introducing intelligent buying techniques and processes that are tailored to their business needs, it should be relatively straightforward to secure the support of senior stakeholders. Consider a rate parity guarantee with your travellers, if they can make an identical booking through another source, the TMC should refund the difference, but ensure that apples are compared with apples, look out for non-refundable rates, inferior room types and other variations.
- Monitor your ongoing spend and amend policies as trends arise
With a consistent approach to travel management comes improved insight and better control. This means it should now be even easier to find the data you need to have improved the real-time visibility of your overall hotel spend and drill down into the areas where even greater efficiencies could be achieved.
Make sure you’re clear on the reporting resource for your hotel management solution to monitor trends and know how to review the programme’s performance as well as identify changing behaviours that you may need to review with your TMC.
Gary Hance, director of operational improvement and yield, ATPI