A sponsored exclusive viewpoint article by Kayleigh Reid, Marketing Executive at INC. Travel Group
Reporting is one of the most important parts of any business. Reports show us how we're performing against our KPIs, highlighting where we're doing well as well as where we need to improve.
Here are just some of the reports available in business travel.
Advanced purchase windows
As you're probably already aware, booking travel as far in advance as possible is often most cost effective as fares tend to increase the closer you get to the day of travel. However, we've found that, on average, 75% of travel spend is made within the seven days prior to travel — this often means companies aren't saving as much as they could.
Reports can identify how many fares were booked in advance and how many were booked close to the day of travel. Obviously some roles, such as sales roles, require more reactive travel arrangements and tickets can't be booked in advance, but we often see instances where tickets could easily have been booked in advance and savings could have been made.
Advance purchase window reports are designed to help you drive change within your business and encourage travel to be arranged as far in advance as possible to take advantage of cheaper and more flexible fares.
Types of tickets
As well as when tickets are bought, reports can also show the types of tickets that have been bought.
Why is this useful? For example, advance tickets are often far cheaper per mile when bought as two singles rather than a return. This report will show when the most cost effective ticket types are (or aren't) being purchased, from which we can then make recommendations.
For instance, we often recommend travellers get a ticket for a specific journey to their destination and a flexible fare back if the traveller isn't sure what time the meeting will finish. this solution balances flexibility with cost effectiveness.
Carbon footprint
More and more companies are paying extra attention to their carbon footprint these days and the effect their travel is having on the environment. Some businesses will even have certain quotas and targets to meet in terms of their carbon footprint.
We can display the amount of CO2 per trip within the booking tool to encourage travellers to take greener options and proactively report the CO2 footprint per trip. Many travel buyers find these CO2 reports to be invaluable for producing CSR statements in sales pitches and for managing their own green programmes.
Frequent flyer reports
This report looks at the flying habits of employees travelling to the same or similar locations regularly to work out whether savings can be made.
For example, if someone regularly travels to New York but uses several different airlines, the report will flag this up. We can then look to consolidate this to one airline and manage a yearly contract with them on your behalf, which will work out much more cost effective.
This is something that would then have to be added into your travel policy and monitored to ensure travellers adhered to it — reports can show you that, too!
Hotels
In a very similar way to the frequent flyer reports above, we can also run reports on which hotels are the most popular with your travel bookers. If we find that travellers are booking various different hotels, we can look to 'lift and shift' to one particular chain of hotels. By committing to block bookings over a longer period of time, most hotel chains will offer significant discounts, saving more money and making booking more efficient.
Total trip costs — including ancillary spend
When you book with an airline, you'll be given a base ticket fare, and then get charged add ons such as baggage, preferred seats, meals, etc. Similarly, hotels will offer you the room price and then add on extras like breakfast, Wi-Fi, parking, etc. These add ons are called ancillary costs and can turn what seems like an cost effective trip into a very expensive one, very quickly.
Our reports can show the total spend of the trip, including those ancillary costs, rather than breaking down into every last cost. This makes life much easier for your finance department to process.
Similarly, our online booking tool also shows the overall cost of the trip upfront to make it simple to present to an approver.
Cost centre reporting
You know your split of spend on air, rail, and hotel. But do you know your spend per office? Our reporting systems can show exactly where money is being spent on travel across the organisation. Every trip is given a job number, making it simple for the finance department to attribute trips to certain individuals or departments. For example, you can easily see if HR spent £30K in May, sales spent £100K, that team building day out cost £2K, etc.
Negative reports
It might not sound like the nicest part, but we can also run reports on travellers who repeatedly reject cost saving areas and choose more expensive flights or hotels.
Rather than punish those who do this, we actively reward those who choose cheaper options and save the company money. 'Gamification' has become a popular way of rewarding best practice and our system allows employees to accrue points for cost saving, which can then be exchanged for rewards negotiated by the company.
This is all about changing employees' habits over time and making companies significant savings on travel processes.