If corporates have air spend in their grip and are making increasing efforts to bring hotel and rail spend under control, that leaves one last major area for attention: car transport.
This can be divided into the car rental and the chauffeur/taxicab markets. Often these were outside the realm of the travel manager. It was the fleet manager who booked the hire or chauffeur drive cars and the receptionist who called the cab company or even the traveller hailing one in the street.
Great strides, aided by improved technology, have been made by the major car rental companies to the MI they require. Corporates now increasingly send Requests for Proposals (RFPs) to the car companies and these find themselves dealing in turn with the procurement manager or travel specialist.
The number of deals between corporates and chauffeur drive companies is growing suggesting that there is a definite market, at least in the UK, for this sort of service with merchant banks and financial houses are among the top customers. The expanding business is borne out by the growing number of such companies in the country with Tristar Worldwide, Burgundy Global, Carey Worldwide and a newcomer Matrix all competing for business.
There is also a company called Business Transport Resources, now three years old, which acts basically as an agent to find corporates the cab company which will offer them the cheapest trip to their destination.
The chauffeur and cab business in Greater London alone is worth £2bn a year and many firms sign contracts worth £250,000 and up to £1m a year, Mathew Hassell, ceo for Matrix, said.
One major reason for this is London's huge financial centres, based in the City and Docklands. Another is the sheer size of the place, making a Docklands office to Heathrow airport chauffeur car a reasonable financial proposition.
More prosaically, London does not have the best public transport system in the world for business travellers and with congestion charges and severe parking problems, cabs and chauffeur drive are a welcome alternative.
But if the market in London is large, it is also “heavily fragmented” said Mr Hassell and it was this that his company was attempting to redress.
“We are backed by Radio Taxis, one of the big three licensed cab operations in London, so we can offer this service as well as chauffeur driven executive cars and mini-cabs,” he said.
“This means we can give the customer a range of services as well as various methods of payment from cash to credit cards. We are offering a genuine one-stop shop.”
Matrix is now in the process of setting up a training school for its executive class drivers. “This is my pet project,” said Mr Hassell who has been in the car drive industry 15 years and was a co-founder of Burgundy global, now a rival. “We are not just going to have the drivers come in for half a day.
“It is going to be an intensive, two-week, full-time course before we let them out onto the road. The training will focus on a number of areas but it will be as much on the customer service aspect as opposed to being good drivers which they would have to be anyway.
“This will include appearance - our executive drivers will have a uniform, dealing with angry customers, opening doors, how to engage the customer and which topics to avoid, and dealing with any encounters with road rage.”
But while these services seem to be leaping ahead in London both Mr Hassell and Dean De Beer, managing director of Tristar, say that the market on the continent is very different.
“There are two big markets in the world for chauffeur driven cars, London and New York. Both are huge financial centres. 95% of the world's top companies are based in London or New York, both have extremely busy airports,” Mr Hassell said.
But while Frankfurt comes almost into those categories, he said the demand was just not there. “In Frankfurt, your cab is a Mercedes and the driver usually speaks English so why do you need a chauffeur driven car. We have found the chauffeur drive market in Canary Wharf in the docklands is larger than the whole of Germany.”
Mr De Beer made similar points. “The German market is spread out over a number of cities, none with the concentration of business travellers that London has. People there use taxis to get to the airport. The service level is reasonable there fore there is not so much demand for chauffeurs.”
He said it was similar in France. “They don't seem to use executive cars like London. Some of the taxis are Mercedes but you can get an old banger.
“It could be partly to do with the size of the city but it is a different mentality. People in the UK travel more and many expect chauffeured cars.”