Amon Cohen ponders the riddle: when is business travel not business travel?
I SUSPECT I’M GOING to sound like one of those High Court judges needing to be told who The Beatles are, but here goes anyway. A couple of weeks ago I attended a small planning meeting at a Regus business centre in London’s Berkeley Square – not far from my club, in fact.
I don’t know if you’ve ever visited a Regus establishment, but what struck meimmediately was the sight of dozens of youngish professional types beavering away at their laptops from numerous armchairs and mini-desks distributed around the lobby area. Moving upstairs to my meeting room on the first floor, I passed still more of them dispersed along the landing, all focused intently on their work.
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The sight vividly brought home to me that where and how people work really is changing. I reckon it’s an issue travel managers should also look at more closely if they aren’t already – and when I spoke to Regus UK managing director Steve Purdy, he (not too surprisingly) agreed. I reckon it is well over tenyears since I first heard the theory that travel management would expand tobecome mobility management, covering all aspects of employees’ needs outside their primary work location. That has not really happened. Maybe it’s time it did.
Purdy cited research conducted for his firm that claims two-fifths of Britain’s workers spend at least half their working week not at their main office. Laptops and mobile communications mean they can potentially be productive anywhere; but, said Purdy, cafés are often too noisy and uncomfortable for two to three hours of medium-to-high concentration. Regus is opening more business space in locations as diverse as motorway service stations and even Staples office supply stores.
What it all amounts to is a fast-expanding realm of corporate activity that doesn’t exactly count as business travel, but cannot be labelled commuting or regular office work either. It is an activity thatneeds managing, both to monitor and control cost and provide expert advice for employees and senior management.
I’m willing to bet that many companies haven’t started to manage this subject yet. It is just the sort of category that falls between various departments, such as travel, human resources and facilities management. “More enlightened travel managers will be saying: ‘I need to understand what’s out there in terms of how people work and where they can work,’” Purdy told me. “It is definitely an area for them to grab hold of if they aren’t today.”
He added that research by Regus found 72 per cent of companies believe flexible working practices boost productivity and, therefore, profitability. That’s all very well, I said, but travel managers are often incentivised on how much they reduce the cost of their air tickets or hotel bills. His response: travel managers will climb higher if they think bigger. “Rather than looking at the unit price of air or hotel, they need to look at the wider issue,” he said.
“The best travel managers and procurement directors will be having these conversations and passing them up the line. Someone who goes the extra mile like this will add more value to their role.”
IT’S NOT JUST WHAT travel managers manage that is changing – so is where they manage. As fellow BBT contributor Gary Noakes pointed out in the last issue, the Global Business Travel Association estimates business travel expenditure in China will exceed that in the US for the first time in 2013.
Perhaps it is no surprise, therefore, to find early signs of China leapfrogging theWest in terms of travel and mobile technology. A recent announcement by Carlson Wagonlit Travel seemed highly symbolic to me. It said it has launched a mobile booking app in China, whereas customers in the rest of the world will have to wait for a similar service until later this year. Meanwhile, consulting service Gartner forecasts that by 2016 payments by mobile will be far more prevalent in Asia than in Europe or North America. It’s time to wake up and smell the lapsang souchong.
I BUMPED INTO a travel manager I hadn’t seen for a while at January’s Business Travel Awards. She told me that not only has her company downgraded its travel policy, but it is also starting to mandate much more rigorously than ever before. But what about ‘rogue is vogue’ and Managed Travel 2.0, I protested – all those theories that companies must relax policies, not tighten them? “We announced the new policy at the same time that we made a lot of people redundant,” she replied. “It seemed to communicate the message pretty effectively.”
IF THAT WAS A SMALL victory for travel managers, then the recent announcement that the US Transportation Security Administration is removing Rapiscan’s ‘backscatter’ scanning machines from airports is surely a victory for travellers. These are the scanners that display passengers pretty much naked to security staff. They are being replaced because the manufacturer was unable to blur the images satisfactorily. By virtually stripping us of our clothes, the scanners were a small reminder that when the so-called War on Terror also strips away people’s dignity, it risks destroying the liberties we are supposed to be fighting for in the first place.
Incidentally, while checking that story, I stumbled across a highly amusing photo-feature on the Forbes magazine website, entitled ‘The Dumbest Things People Try To Get Through Airport Security’. Items included hunting knives, bullet-studded belts and – my favourite – a set of frying pans. “Anyone who doubts that frying pans can be used as weapons clearly hasn’t been watching enough cartoons,” Forbes noted drily.
NEWSFLASH: FURTHER TO my first item, I have just been informed The Beatles are no longer making gramophone records. Apparently they are all made by, er, Beyoncé. Not sure if that’s a man, a woman or a skiffle group, but I will endeavour to find out and let you know next time.