A recent survey of 200 UK travel managers has found their
role is rapidly changing to include responsibility for sourcing venues for
their company’s meetings and events.
Chris McAndrews, vice president of marketing for Cvent
Hospitality Cloud, which carried out the research, said: “Corporate travel
managers are leveraging more external resources to make decisions and have more
complex concerns than ever before. They also have more complex roles.
Eighty-six per cent of respondents are responsible not only for organising
travel, but also sourcing venues for their company’s meetings and events. There
is a strong call to action for hotels to address these concerns and support the
changing needs of CTMs in order to secure more MICE business.”
The 2020 Cvent Travel Managers’ Report – UK Edition offers insights
into what travel managers are looking for when sourcing and negotiating with
hotels for their travel programmes. This includes a number of concerns about
supplier transparency during the sourcing and negotiating processes, with 38
per cent saying a lack of transparency on the part of hotels and venues when
quoting pricing is their top challenge during the process.
This compares to travel managers in Germany, 100 per cent of
whom said transparency is their biggest issue.
More than half (51 per cent) of UK respondents saying hidden
costs not stated during discussions is a top reason for excluding or removing properties
from their programmes.
Other top challenges include hotel chain managers not
relaying information from negotiations to their individual properties, rate
increases versus the prior RFP season being above city or benchmark average,
and poor service, both pre and post-stay.
The research also revealed the importance of Last Room
Availability (LRA) increases for larger travel programmes, with more than half
(51 per cent) of UK respondents saying LRA is essential if hotels want to be
included in their hotel programme. This statistic changes depending on the
number of room nights booked, with only 34 per cent of those booking under 500
rooms per year per hotel saying they prefer LRA compared to 80 per cent of
those booking 10,001-plus rooms.
When asked about the growing complexity of their role,
respondents ranked environmental sustainability as their third-biggest
challenge for 2020, behind only staying within budget and duty of care, which
tied for first.
At the time of the survey, nearly half (49 per cent) of UK
travel managers said they plan to increase the number of hotels in their travel
programmes, whilst another 49 per cent also plan to grow room nights. Sixty-one
per cent said they hope to support employee travel to countries not previously
in their programmes, while nearly 75 per cent will incorporate new regions.
BTN Europe will be talking about the findings of the survey
with Graham Pope, head of Europe, Hospitality Cloud, at Cvent, live at the
Business Travel Show at 11am on 27 February. Tune in to BTN TV here to watch
the interview.
Cvent will be on stand B3400 throughout the duration of the
event.
Click here to read the full 2020 Cvent Travel Managers' Report - UK Edition.