The initial encroachment of procurement departments into travel management was met with both fears and serious misgivings by travel specialists.
Many travel managers lost their jobs with companies deciding that travel was just another commodity which could be handled by the purchasing experts or even outsourced.
The pendulum may have swung slightly back with travel managers bringing a human element to management and also promoting themselves as travel strategists. But there is not much doubt that procurement has tightened its grip on travel management.
The extent to which this has happened was outlined by Herve Joseph-Antoine, Carlson Wagonlit Travel's vp solutions group EMEA in his presentation on best practice and optimising savings at the Association of Corporate Travel Executives' Paris Forum.
Procurement was playing a bigger role in air and hotel purchase, security, process, meetings and policy compliance than it was even a year ago. Indeed a major part of the difference was that procurement was not just focusing on air – traditionally the biggest area of spend – but on all areas.
"The big change is the scope, it has really enlarged in the past year. The route map for the procurement people is significantly larger," Mr Joseph-Antoine said. It was, also, a trend that applied to all of Europe, not just the more advanced countries in terms of travel management.
On air purchase, he said procurement was clearly trying to influence traveller behaviour by getting them to book in advance and accept restrictions – two sure ways to cut ticket prices.
"We are also seeing procurement people going very deep into smart ticketing through the TMCs with dedicated analysing prices and savings," he said.
On hotels where the aim was to get the best available rate, Mr Joseph-Antoine said procurement was doing a mix of negotiated rates and floating or dynamic rates. "We are seeing companies channelling bookings through online tools instead of having the bookers do it on their own," he said.
On process there was a wide acknowledgement of the attractions and benefits of going online with companies driving up adoption rates. The benefits of expense management, of end to end IT integration were also increasingly accepted.
Meetings was still a major unexploited area but Mr Joseph-Antoine said the maturity of the IT tools available meant that companies do bookings, negotiations, conference registration and payment all online.
A key to savings in this area, he said, was the use of meetings cards which many companies were now piloting. In return hotels were responding by providing packages which included the meeting room, lunch, diner and overnight rooms.
These were all cost saving areas. The two anomalous areas were security and corporate social responsibility, both of which incurred costs rather than produced savings.
He said the terrorist threat had forced companies and their procurement departments to put in place tracking facilities so that they knew exactly where their travellers were at any one time.
On corporate social responsibility, companies were now including in their RFP's to travel managements companies questions on how "green" they were and what they were doing in regards to the protection of the environment.
But the prominence of these two areas which cost money does not seem to mean that the fixation with savings has changed or decreased. That still appears to be as strong as ever. Mr Joseph-Antoine said that there were still some companies so intent on savings that they had imposed temporary freezes on travel.
But it does suggest that the "human" element of travel for those who do not accept that it is just another commodity is perhaps more relevant than is sometimes thought.