The oil'n'gas industry makes some very particular demands on the travel management business, as Bob Papworth discovers
Go to The Corporate Travel Partnership's website - www.thectp.co.uk - and there, on the home page, is a lovely quote from Red Adair: "I've got bells that jingle, jangle, jingle" .... sorry, wrong quote ... that was from a sufferer from Hansen's Disease ... the Red Adair quote is ... "If you think it's expensive to hire a professional, wait until you hire an amateur."
It's a great sales pitch for a travel management consultancy (TMC) - but, of course, Adair wasn't a travel consultant. Younger readers, start here ...
Paul Neal 'Red' Adair shot to international celebrity status in 1962 when he used 500 tons of explosives to blow out - literally - a massive fire at a Saharan gas field. The 450-foot pillar of flame, visible from space, had been raging for six months.
In 1988, he capped the blazing remains of the Piper Alpha rig in the North Sea, and followed that by extinguishing fires at no fewer than 117 Kuwaiti oil wells set alight by Saddam Hussein's troops retreating from the Operation Desert Storm onslaught in 1991.
Without wishing in any way to denigrate The Corporate Travel Partnership's senior partner Richard Plummer, colourful though he may be, he's not in quite the same league. However, like Adair, he does know a thing or to about the oil'n'gas industry, or at least about travel management within the sector.
While it's not as hairy as fire-fighting - Plummer reckons 80 per cent of the business involves perfectly straightforward trips between, for example, London and Houston or Aberdeen and Stavanger - it certainly has its moments.
Way 'upstream', to use the industry jargon, oil exploration teams tend to travel to some pretty inhospitable places. Once they have found the stuff in economically viable quantities, the extraction teams move in, and their comparative wealth forces prices through the roof.
'Downstream' are the refineries, but nowhere near enough of them. "Refinery capacity is at a premium," says Plummer, "and if you have to close one down for some reason, it's important to get it back on line as quickly as possible.
Consequently, there is a team of very highly specialist engineers - these people are treated like gods - flying around almost constantly, and they all travel at the front of the plane."
On the accommodation front, there is a complex mix of demand. In what Plummer describes as "the diffi cult countries", the bigger oil companies have their own accommodation, often in heavily guarded compounds; at the management level, and where those refinery gods are concerned, the requirement is for upscale, short-stay hotels and apartments.
In the middle, there is heavy demand for longer-stay accommodation - a week or more at a time - for those who are commuting between, for example, Scotland and Norway. Serviced apartments are at a premium. So far, so very straightforward.
However, other travel industry figures involved with the oil'n'gas sector have other views - in fact, they all have very different experiences and very different opinions. Not only do the travel requirements vary considerably within one client company, they also vary from client to client.
Consequently, when Plummer suggests that cost is not a top-of-the-agenda issue, Alistair Rowe, BCD Travel's general manager for the Thames Valley and the Southwest, says that fares have to be fully flexible, but his big energy client generally opts for nothing more than Premium Economy.
Then again, Claire Murphy at Capita Business Travel reckons there is much more of a seniority based mix, with the lower echelons relegated to the higher double-digit seat numbers while the suits pick at the salted almonds and have their jackets squirreled away on real coat-hangers.
However, ATP, The Advanced Travel Partner marketing head Jeremy King says it is a mistake to assume, just because the price of oil has gone stratospheric, cost-control isn't an issue. He says oil'n'gas guys are no less budget-conscious than any other sector's travellers: "There is maybe a perception that because the price of oil is high, executives are being profligate with their money, and that's absolutely not the case. These guys are just as focused on cost as anyone else."
Apart from Aberdeen and Stavanger, which crop up with almost monotonous regularity, there is little consensus among our three travel management professionals on the prime destinations, either. BCD does a lot of bookings into India and South Africa; Capita's Murphy says Tulsa is high on her list; and ATP's King is adamant that Paris (France, not Texas) is crucial, which is partly why the company has recently opened an office there.
King also contests Plummer's assertion that the vast majority of oil'n'gas travel is good ol' point-to-point stuff. It can be, he admits, but the easy-to-awkward ratio is more like 70/30 and, in some cases, 60/40. "What you might call the 'rogue' element absolutely dominates the philosophy of these organisations," he says. "However, in my experience with these clients, you get much less of the 'do you know who I am?' syndrome. These people operate in a very professional corporate culture, and while they expect high levels of service they don't generally overstep the mark."
Murphy, however, warns: "Unfortunately, compliance isn't king - we wish it was. Culturally, these companies are employing mature, professional individuals who are highly experienced - and in many cases they will not be dictated to. "We might suggest staying in a £150-a-night hotel, but if they want to stay somewhere that costs £200 a night, they will - even if the cheaper option is perfectly suitable and readily available. If it's in the programme, they can use it; policy is not based on 'cheapest first', especially not at the moment, with trading conditions being so buoyant." ATP's King raises another oil'n'gas USP (which could also stand for 'uniquely stressful problem') - crew changes.
Because of the exceptionally high value of the huge quantities of product involved, full crews - not just most of them - have to be in place bang on time. "If you've got a tanker offshore waiting to be loaded, the crew simply has to be there, otherwise it's just not going to happen. In any other sector, if the flight is delayed, or the ground transportation doesn't show up, it is certainly very frustrating, but it's not insurmountable, and most clients will accept that it is beyond your control," says King. "In the oil industry, there are absolutely no excuses - the sums of money involved mean there is absolutely no room for manoeuvre."
Unfortunately for the hapless TMC, the countries in which oil'n'gas clients largely operate tend to be those in which things are more likely to go wrong, and where alternative solutions are not always readily available. King explains: "There isn't anything like the range of accommodation, for example, that exists elsewhere - and what there is generally very expensive and often close to capacity if not booked out.
And acceptance of corporate cards is very patchy, and in some places all but non-existent." If it all sounds a bit much for your average TMC, it probably is - but that's only half the story. If there's one element of doing business with the sector that all these commentators agree on wholeheartedly, it is that traveller safety and security is not just high on the agenda but actually has an agenda all of its own.
BCD's big energy client does a lot of travel to and from Norway, which presents few challenges, but once travellers start to head out into the former Soviet states, Algeria or Nigeria, security become the paramount issue. "Obviously BCD is geared up for this sort of thing happening," says Rowe, "but the scale of issue is such that they have their own department devoted to safety and security, and we have to work very, very closely with them. "They have their own people on the ground, with teams of personal security guards to escort them in and out.
One of the reasons our client insists on fully-flexible tickets is because their travellers have to have the ability to leave the country at a moment's notice." Richard Plummer has undisguised admiration for the way the oil and gas companies look after their employees. "Security is a huge issue, and the internal systems within all the companies we have worked with have been excellent - the very best in the business," he says. "They're superb at providing pre-trip briefings to travellers, they have access to the very best security information - it's just inbred into their corporate culture."
ATP's King agrees. "Oil and gas industry employees are extremely vulnerable to all kinds of threats - from assault, robbery and even kidnapping, because they are seen as comparatively wealthy, to genuinely life-threatening attacks by armed terrorists who resent their presence despite the economic wealth they can bring," he says. "Traveller tracking is absolutely essential, and travel policy compliance has to be way higher than in many other industries. Travel management in the oil and gas sector involves a great deal of pre-trip preparation, briefing travellers fully on the conditions and challenges they may encounter, and round-the-clock monitoring - incidents, sometimes very dangerous ones, can occur at almost any time.
"Ultimately one has to have comprehensive and detailed evacuation plans in place for the more volatile regions." Traveller tracking and round-the-clock monitoring, he stresses, are core to the whole oil and gas travel management business - but this is not just any old after-hours service. "It's not something you can just tack on to the proposal as some sort of added-value service," King says. "When they say they want round-the-clock service, they mean full service, 24 hours a day, not just a couple of emergency numbers to call when their flight is cancelled. "These people are operating a 24-hour day, working in diffi cult and sometimes dangerous situations, with a bulk product which is worth huge amounts of money.
The TMC has to be able to respond to any incident, at any time of day or night, with a full team of experienced and expert people available at a moment's notice. These companies take safety very, very seriously indeed - so much so that we as a TMC have learned a lot that we have been able to pass on. They take all their safety procedures much more seriously than almost any other sector," King continues. "On the security side, there are two components. First, there's the intelligence side, which is pre-trip planning, risk analysis, traveller briefings, and so on. Alongside that, there is more general traveller training - putting all their travellers through tough training courses to help them understand how to react if a situation arises.
"And then there's the operational side - almost always ex-servicemen, ready to go in at any time to protect and evacuate employees who find themselves in real danger."
The oil and gas sector clearly isn't for the faint-hearted, and having led off with Red Adair, it seems appropriate to conclude with him, too.
Adair once joked that he wasn't afraid of death because he had already made a pact with the devil - Satan was going to give him specially air-conditioned accommodation so he wouldn't put all the fires out. Now that's what you call pre-trip planning ...
