Younger readers may be interested to learn that before adopting his present role stalking the nation’s railways and rendering extraordinary services to the salmon-pink jacket manufacturing industry, Michael Portillo was our defence secretary. During that tenure, Mr Portillo made a bit of a – what’s the polite word? – twit of himself when he declared: “Around the world, three letters send a chill down the spine of the enemy: SAS.”
Speaking personally, it’s three words, not letters, which send a chill down my spine. They are ‘time’, ‘gentlemen’ and ‘please’. In the world of pharmaceuticals, however, three letters really have been striking fear into meetings managers, namely: TOV.
For the uninitiated, this acronym stands for ‘transfers of value’, which is the amount pharma companies spend on each healthcare professional (HCP). As of this year, all such businesses operating in 33 European countries are obliged to report their TOVs publicly, and that includes how much was spent on meetings.
One pharma meetings manager I interviewed recently said it has been a “huge amount of work”. TOVs need to include what was spent on every event registration, plus every flight, train journey, bus transfer and taxi for each. And just to liven things up a bit, the reporting requirements vary across all 33 markets. Strikingly, in spite of, or perhaps because of, their love of a good dinner, the French are the ones with the toughest rules. Every expense above €10 must be declared, and it is interdit to spend more than €60 per head on a meal. In my experience of dining with the French, that sum barely covers the aperitifs, so you can see why this is causing a problem. According to my interviewee, hotels are having to create special budget menus to stay within the cap.
My source also contends that the TOV figures, when published, will show the pharma industry has nothing to hide because “the days of spending a week in the Napa Valley just drinking wine are long gone”. Of course, it is only because light has slowly been shone on the industry that those days are over. There may be less need for transparency in other sectors, but what interests me about the TOV exercise is that it proves companies really can track their travel spend in tooth-combed detail if they have to.
As always, it’s a question of whether the benefits justify the investment. One reason TOVs have been so time-consuming has been the need to verify agency data manually against receipts. I have evangelised about virtual credit cards before and, once again, I can’t help feeling they might be the answer here. Virtual cards are used only once (or for a strictly defined and limited set of transactions), so the card number becomes a unique identifier that inherently reconciles the booked and billed data. If anyone wants to take me out for dinner to thank me for this invaluable advice, they are welcome to do so – and don’t feel the need to limit the bill to €60.
WHILE ‘TIME, GENTLEMEN, PLEASE’ is my least favourite trio of words, my most hated single word may well be ‘bleisure’. This ugly neologism describes the trend of tacking leisure time on to a business trip. What concerns me more is when executives do the opposite: allowing work to intrude into time off. According to a recent survey commissioned by Egencia, 53 per cent of travellers check their work emails at least once a day while on holiday.
We need a new word for this phenomenon. How about ‘wallyday’? Because readers, believe me, if you are thinking about work, you aren’t truly relaxing and, ultimately, you are making yourself a less effective worker. Consider the American word ‘vacation’. That’s exactly what a holiday should be: vacate your head of everyday work issues and, as one great Scouse guru put it, turn off your mind, relax and float downstream...
When you do go back to work, you will be much more productive and, indeed, creative because of all the other thoughts you will finally have allowed to seep in.
This epidemic of workaholism must end. And, on that note, I’m off to book a week in the Napa Valley.#
Amon Cohen is a specialist business travel writer, conference moderator and media trainer.