Five tweaks for smart travel policy.
Our customer, a leading UK financial services provider challenged us to help them control their travel costs with five smart travel policy tweaks that didn’t negatively impact employees.
One of the UK’s leading financial services groups, recently invited suppliers, to share best practices from their own sectors with the aim to see how the company could control costs and streamline the way it works.
Our team came up with some simple suggestions to tighten up their travel policy without compromising on the traveller experience.
Savings
2 days
Bookings processed as billback
500
Rebates
95%
Value-added services
6
1. Small change, big difference.
Our customer made some sensible, straightforward changes based on our recommendations, such as banning the use of anytime rail tickets for people travelling reasonably long distances and removing the option of first-class tickets unless there was a business case put forward. These were measures that make perfect sense but hadn’t been considered before.
2. Sum it up at a glance.
Can your core travel policy regulations fit on one page? If not, it might be a good time to think about a rewrite. Having previously had a weighty travel policy for our customer, it was difficult to find out what you could and couldn’t do without wading through 30-odd intranet pages to discover the relevant section. Together, we created a handy one-page policy document that allowed employees to familiarise themselves with the key points at a glance.
Having a one-page summary really helped promote the changes we’ve been making to the travel policy, and cut down the number of queries we’d otherwise be getting.
Account Manager, Agiito.
3. Use your influence with suppliers.
Like many companies, our customer has key locations around the country that it tends to send its business to, including Cardiff, Brighton and London.
Due to the volumes, our team can negotiate fantastic deals with hotels in these key areas, without compromising on the quality. The rate cap could also be bought down in certain locations too.
4. Give travellers choice (and earn trust).
Our customer has avoided introducing dramatic travel restrictions for their employees, it has however mandated that traveller’s book through our online booking tool as opposed to booking elsewhere.
“Some people think they can get it cheaper if they book it themselves – but we’ve explained to them that booking through the portal is the easiest, quickest and cheapest way to travel, given the great rates and added extras we’ve secured. The portal makes it easy for travellers to view, choose and book cheaper tickets, as well as giving us visibility of where they’ll be, fulfilling our duty of care”, our Account Manager explains.
5. Track whether it’s working.
Identifying potential cost savings is one thing – but making sure they happen is another. We’ve created a savings tracker for our customer so their travel costs across the company can be reviewed regularly.
“Hopefully there will be some interesting outputs. If it doesn’t give us the results we’re after in the short term, it’ll show us where we need to focus our attention in the long-term – such as individuals or departments who aren’t complying with policy.” – Account Manager, Agiito.
An expert is invaluable in terms of seeing the bigger picture, as our customer suggests: “If we weren’t outsourcing our travel, we’d need an army of people here to pull the data together and work out what’s going on.
“Working with Agiito makes it a lot simpler to drill down into the data we need.” – Supplier Relationships Manager, Leading UK financial services provider
It’s been brilliant working with our account manager and the rest of the team at Agiito to evolve our existing travel policy.
Supplier Relationship Manager, Leading UK financial services provider.
Results.
“It’s been brilliant working with our Account Manager and the rest of the team at Agiito to evolve our existing travel policy. They came up with some cost saving ideas that were really well-received and followed through on delivering them. If our travel remains at about the same level over the next 12 months, the savings over that timeframe are well worth going after.” - Supplier Relationships Manager, Leading UK financial services provider.
The team has delivered £1.8m total savings for our customer over a 3-year period.