This week we have learned that the Royal
Family is looking for someone to look after its business travel. In the jobs
section of the Royal Household’s website is a new
vacancy for Director of Royal Travel. Rather than being in an corporate
building somewhere, the successful applicant will get to work at Buckingham
Palace. However, before you get excited, it is worth mentioning that a few
years ago the travel office was in a narrow windowless basement room.
What have the Royal Family got in common
with regular businesses, you ask?
The job description sounds very similar to
what most travel managers do but what have the Royal Family got in common with
regular businesses? They both travel on business and face similar challenges.
Even the Duke of Edinburgh often refers to the Royal Family as “the Firm”.
The new director will be required to “ensure
planning and procedures are highly effective, researching and negotiating value
for money contracts and options for travel, while understanding and
recommending best industry practice in risk and safety management”.
They will also need to consider “safety,
security, dignity, the need to minimise disruption for others, the effective
use of time, environmental impact and cost are taken into account when deciding
on the most appropriate means of travel”.
The director will need good negotiation and
communication skills and be hot on being well prepared. The job description
also calls for “the ability to resolve conflicting demands and to withstand
pressures whilst maintaining good working relations”.
All very similar.
Yet the main difference is tucked away in
that word “dignity”.
The Royal Family often travel in privately
chartered planes, by helicopter or even on “the Royal Train”.
Like most organisations, the Royal Family must
be aware of return on investment. Every year, their expenditure is met from
public funds in exchange for the surrender of a set share of the revenue from
the Crown Estate, the land and buildings which belong to the Queen.
Each year, the Royal Family produce a
report on how it has spent the so-called Sovereign
Grant and this includes details of the travel they have undertaken during
the year on official business.
The 2018-19 report reveals that the Royal
Family carried out more than 3,200 official engagements during the year—the
most expensive of which was an itinerary including St Lucia, Barbados, St
Vincent and the Grenadines, St Kitts and Nevis, Grenada, Cuba and Grand Cayman
for The Prince of Wales and The Duchess of Cornwall which cost £417,000.
Of the £4.6 million spent on royal travel
in 2018-19, around £1.7 million goes on helicopters, another £1.7 million on
fixed wing charters and £0.2 million on scheduled services. Rail travel
accounts for £0.8 million. Cars represent the remainder of the spend.
Accommodation costs are notable by their absence—the Queen and her family tend
to stay in the official residence of the Head of State of the country they are
visiting on official visits. The new director is unlikely to need to negotiate
a hotel deal with, say, Crowne Plaza, despite the potential for some clever
publicity.
Some £2.7 million of that spend is on trips
that cost more than £15,000 and you can see these in this appendix
to the report.
So how does the ‘business’ travel of the
Royal Family relate to the world of corporate travel?
We can consider members of the Royal Family
as personas that exist in more everyday organisations.
Seniority: The trip of the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall to
Africa in October 2018 shows why it is important to have different travel
policies for different tiers of staff. The support staff who put the trip
together travelled on scheduled services while the royal party went via a
privately chartered plane. If the staff had not flown scheduled, the cost would
have been considerably more than the £216,312 spent on the entire trip.
One-size-fits-all travel policies may work in flat organisational structures
but consider introducing a separate policy for your most senior staff who are
constantly on the road and even engage a high-touch travel management company
to handle C-suite travel.
Changing travel
patterns: The Duke of York’s two most expensive
business trips amounted to more than £38,000 during the year. However, the
issues currently swirling around Prince Andrew mean he may be keeping his head
down in the coming year and his individual travel spend will be far lower.
Corporate travel buyers always need to think about how the loss of a piece of
business or a change in the supply chain may make significant changes to their
travel budgets. As a result, it is important to be tuned in to what is
happening at the strategic level in a business.
The environment: For the Prince of Wales—a passionate advocate for the environment—there
is worrying news in the report: the carbon emissions associated with business
travel increased by 93% during the year. The report says that this was due to
“higher usage of chartered large fixed wing aircraft for foreign business
travel” and a larger number of overseas trips in 2018-19 compared to 2017-18.
With Greta Thunberg so much in the news, the environment is also becoming an
increasing concern for corporates. How can companies continue to operate as
businesses on the global stage while reducing their carbon footprint? It is not
as easy a problem to solve as reducing our leisure travel.
Brexit: Traditionally, the Queen and the Royal Family are supposed to keep
their noses out of politics. However, QEII has been dragged into the debate
about Britain leaving the European Union. In the event that Britain does
finally leave the EU after years of paralysis, she and her family may well be
called on to travel to the four corners of the Commonwealth to shake hands and
ensure the trading links of old (pre-EU days) are kept warm. Face-to-face
travel to maintain relationships with your longest-standing clients is unlikely
ever to go away. It is hard to imagine the new Director of Royal Travel
recommending that the Queen jump on a web conference with the Commonwealth
heads of state.
End-to-end: Luckily for most organisations, their employees do not usually have
more than one home at opposite ends of the country. Travel by The Queen, The
Duke of Edinburgh, The Prince of Wales and The Duchess of Cornwall and The Duke
and Duchess of Cambridge between residences is categorised as official. In
fact, because the Royal Family often use their residences as offices, you could
argue that a trip to Buck House is little more than a commute.
Royal inter-residence travel is not cheap.
The Queen’s trip between her residences at Balmoral and Windsor Castle in
October 2018 cost the public purse £17,689.
The Director of Royal Travel’s job is not
so different after all and the salary sits comfortably above the typical salary
for a UK travel manager. Interested? You have till just before Christmas to
apply.