Good education opportunities are vital for recruiting and retaining quality teams – both for travel buyers and agents. Bob Papworth reports
WHEN SOUTH KOREAN artiste Psy stormed the UK singles charts with his intensely-irritating dance number, ‘Gangnam Style’, it certainly came as a surprise – indeed, to some of us, it came as a shock – but the incredulity was short-lived.
After all, what used to be known as ‘the hit parade’ has a habit of throwing the odd curve-ball – sundry football teams, ‘comedy’ duo Hale and Pace, and even the Teletubbies have managed, over the years, to bring the music industry into disrepute.
Not so with Buying Business Travel’s eagerly-anticipated annual Top 50 TMCs ranking and filing the nation’s TMCs in order of their UK sales achievements.
Most of us can predict, with a fair degree of accuracy, which companies are going to take the top ten places. This year, there was just one change to the line-up, Reed & Mackay moving up into the slot vacated by Expotel which disappeared from the list following its acquisition by Capita during 2012. The year before, Egencia UK made its top ten debut – but again, that was the only variation on the theme.
The same predictability applies to business priorities. In 2012, when asked for their targets for the year ahead, 95.8 per cent of respondents identified ‘winning new business’ as the main aim. Sure enough, in 2013, 91 per cent said exactly the same thing.
RECRUITMENT CHALLENGE
Our 2013 research, however, included a new question: ‘What is your biggest challenge in 2013?’ The top answer, with 27 per cent of the votes, was ‘difficulty in recruiting skilled staff’. That obviously suggests that 73 per cent are either having no such difficulties or – and perhaps more likely – they simply were not recruiting staff, skilled or otherwise.
However, the fact that more than a quarter of those polled have been looking, apparently with only limited success, indicates that the pool of talent doesn’t have much by way of a deep end.
BBT’s chart reveals interesting contrasts. For example, Cheshire-based TD Travel, now known as CTI following this summer’s acquisition of hotel booking agency Hotelscene, had 74 staff on its books, with an average of 19 years’ industry experience, while West End Travel’s 20 employees have an average of 18 years’ experience.
Of course, your correspondent is living proof that ‘experience’ does not necessarily equate to ‘expertise’, but these are top 50 TMCs – they wouldn’t be on the list if they weren’t successful, so they must know a thing or two. But compare this to Chambers Travel Management – which this month becomes the Chambers Travel Group, with five re-branded business units – which has around 160 employees with an average of seven years’ experience. That relative youthfulness, according to chief executive Chris Thelen, is in part due to his company’s apprenticeship scheme.
“Julie Cope [Chambers’ EMEA director of operations] is very passionate about this,” he says. “For a company of our size we have a very extensive apprenticeship scheme – it’s a back-to-basics approach that gives our people a very good grounding. We are a very young company, and a very diverse one, so we can provide a range of experience.
“I think it’s very important to bring young people into the business, and into the industry, and the programme has been really successful for us.”
AMBITION AND EXPERIENCE
One success story is Lilly Rutherford, who has just completed her two-year apprenticeship (see panel, p73) and has ambitions to build her responsibilities beyond her current role as a lead agent.
Her experience is precisely what Ken McLeod, corporate director with Advantage Travel Centres, believes is now absolutely essential. Newcomers to the industry need to be trained, and trained quickly; more experienced professionals – buyers and intermediaries alike – need educational programmes that are tailored to the ’nth degree if they are to have any value at all. “We do extensive training within Advantage for our members, and in the past year or so we have been offering IATA fares and ticketing courses specifically for our corporate travel agent members – and it has almost overwhelmed us.
“We have trained more than 500 staff last year, and we look as though we are going to train another 500-plus within the next few months.” The reason for the courses’ success, McLeod believes, is that they are carefully targeted. “We have made it bespoke to our members, very specific to their needs, and that has proved hugely beneficial. Generic education doesn’t cut it any more.”
And the intermediaries have a way to go to catch up with the travel buyers. “In terms of procurement, I think things are very good,” says McLeod. “That has changed dramatically in the past few years – that side of things has improved enormously.”
ACTE country champion Toby Guest, who has an impressive track record as a travel buyer and now runs his own consultancy, Advantilis, couldn’t agree more. “There is always a long way still to go, a lot more that can be done, but I think that within the larger companies there’s a very high level of expertise,” he says. “That makes it hard for TMCs to prove that they add value, because they are not actually saying anything that the travel procurement people haven’t tried themselves."
But FCM's UK general manager Jo Greenfield disagrees with this view. “Even in larger companies, the travel buyer may not have travel as his or her sole responsibility, so they need the support and expertise of a TMC,” she says.
“The role of the TMC’s account managers is to bring together the total spend of the company and then drive savings by changing behaviour using their knowledge of many different customers and the strategies that work.”
That said, there are plenty of travel buyers who cut their procurement teeth in TMCs – a decade or so ago, the TMCs were the pool of talent. Given the recruitment challenges, maybe the outflow needs to be reversed – today, the purchasing professionals are the ones with the expertise.
BUYER TRAINING
Often the most easily accessible training comes from the many education events held throughout the year, in the UK and abroad. These range from short part-day or evening forums and sessions to large-scale two to three -ay conferences.
BBT's own buyer forums are a full day of topical debates and networking. Held in partnership with ACTE, these events are buyer-led in terms of content and input, avoiding formal presentations and Powerpoint in favour of interactive open dialogue. The first BBT Forum, held on October 8, focused on areas such as making travel policy fit for purpose, new technology solutions, and 'value contribution' in a travel programme. The next forum will take place in spring 2014 in London. For more details about these events, click here.
ACTE also runs a range of conferences and forums around the world, while the Institute of Travel & Meetings (ITM) runs regional workshops and forums across the UK.
Online learning schemes are time-saving and easy to use. Training specialist OTT also partners with BBT to offer free online business travel modules, and later this year we are launching a new platform and a range of new courses – click here for more details.
The industry also offers a choice of study courses and qualifications. University students and travel professionals alike are the target market for ACTE's Around the World in 80 Hours programme, which the organisation describes as “a hands-on, global immersion learning programme”. While university students are given a more general overview, those already working in the industry can customise their studies to gain additional market knowledge. At the end of the ten-week course, participants earn ACTE Global Travel Executive certification.
On the procurement side, the Chartered Institute of Purchasing and Supply (CIPS) offers an education programme taking candidates through five qualification levels. CIPS’ certificate in procurement and supply operations is equivalent to a GCSE or NVQ2, while the advanced certificate equates to and ‘A’ Level or NVQ3.
Higher up the scale, the diploma in procurement and supply is a first-year degree course (Higher National Certificate or NVQ4) and the advance diploma is on a par with a second-year honours degree (Higher National Diploma or NVQ5). The professional diploma is equivalent to a Bachelors degree or an NVQ6.
In November, a group of travel management rookies will be in London to learn about the fundamentals of the industry, courtesy of the GBTA Academy. It offers a range of online and face-to-face training programmes aimed at varying levels of expertise and experience.
Once they have completed the two-day 'fundamentals' course on November 26-27, the novices will “gain a career boost and a better understanding of business travel management”, the GBTA says. They’ll also receive a certificate of completion. More advanced is the GBTA’s Global Travel Professional (GTP) Certification, with involves formal exams – the next European sitting takes place in Prague this month.
Closer to home, ITM works in conjunction with Brighton University to offer a degree course in international travel management, which includes an industry placement, providing a taste of life at the corporate coalface. In conjunction with GBTA, the ITM Academy also offers a masters-level course, in partnership with the Wharton School, that “addresses both the opportunities and challenges of conducting business in today’s environment”.
The course at the University of Brighton , ranked as one of the top ten UK universities for “hospitality, leisure, recreation and tourism”, is biased towards the leisure sector, but the ITM’s partnership has helped develop a final-year study channel which focuses on corporate and business travel management.
GETTING UP TO SCRATCH
Like BBT’s Top 50 TMCs, Advantage’s business travel members find recruiting and training new staff a major challenge. Graduates coming out of college or university often aren’t up to scratch, says corporate director Ken McLeod, because only around two-thirds of their time is spent learning – much of the rest is given over to “study leave”.
“Their courses are tailored to fit the college timetable, not the students’ or the industry’s needs,” he complains. “We’ve been looking at how you might fast-track people through a programme to a point where they are confident and skilled enough to sit down at a desk and start to deal direct with a client.
“We reckon we can get that down to about six months, but the resources required are beyond our capabilities at the moment – but the idea has received huge support from our members, so I still think we’ll get there.”
A FANTASTIC OPPORTUNITY
Lilly Rutherford completed her first BTEC Diploma in travel and tourism – with distinction – while still at school, and decided there and then that her future was in the travel industry.
She went on to Mid Kent College and a two-year course to achieve a level-three BTEC National Diploma, an ‘A’ Level equivalent that involved 18 separate modules – one of which just happened to be business travel.
“This unit appealed to me as it stood out as being more of a challenge, and could offer more opportunities and a better career progression,” she says.
After a month’s work experience in an independent leisure travel agency, a couple of months selling events tickets in Crete, and a six-month low-season stint with Haven Holidays, she joined the Chambers Travel Management apprenticeship scheme in June 2011.
“I think the scheme is a fantastic opportunity for young people starting out on a career,” she says. “It has given me the opportunity to launch my career, and has helped me gain a lot of additional qualifications.
“The scheme meant I gained an insight into all departments, including sales support, fares and ticketing, finance, administration, IT, and passports and visas. The fact that I had to take exams throughout helped me to assess how I was progressing.
“I particularly enjoy fares and fare construction, because although these are perhaps the most challenging part of the job, I like a challenge!”
The biggest of those challenges, Rutherford says, is “keeping up with all the changes and news – there are so many new products and changes every week.
“I also like working on different accounts, learning them inside out, from all the unique aspects of their policies to building rapport with the clients.”
Having completed her apprenticeship in June this year, where next?
“My aim is to climb the operational ladder,” she says. “I have already succeeded in becoming a lead agent on one account, so I would like to move towards a role as supervisor or team manager – and I’m not going to stop there.”