Those responsible for managing the travel portfolio and budgets within a business face many obstacles. It’s clear that these challenges impact the quality of the services offered by internal travel managers. These can often drive priorities away from the value for money or issues such as Duty of Care, dealing with last-minute itinerary changes and grappling with the decisions of which hotel rooms or classes of ticket will be best to secure.
Not to mention, the value and increasing attractions of loyalty programmes offered by practically every travel and hospitality business. These problems are not only in the domain of the largest corporate travellers, either.
Travel managers may be asking themselves questions like:
• Do I focus on improving the quality of the travel experience endured by my staff?
• Do I look for reduced cost options to improve the bottom line?
• How will dynamic pricing help manage values?
• How can I be sure that the TMC’s and agents we employ are offering true value for money?
• With rapidly changing market prices (with daily swings of 50-60%), how do I ensure that I can prove to senior management the value of our travel programme and for it not to be an out-of-control overhead?
• How do I achieve an overall balance to the travel programme?
As many do, looking toward others can be a great way of helping you come up with the answers you need to drive your business forward.
ERA Travel offers a sensible and flexible approach to helping you establish the right travel programme for your business. We offer an holistic review of your objectives that is coupled with a forensic view of the day-to-day operations and issues that arise.
We help you navigate the volatile nature of the travel business, enabling you and your employees to see the value of a travel programme that offers your business better options than that of consumer-led market comparison sites or local agents and intermediaries, and eliminates the need for ‘emergency’ services or un-guided accommodation decisions by your travelling workforce. With a dynamic pricing model in place, you will see supplier costs drop below the fluctuating market prices, as well see process time cut to time frames of six weeks, instead of six months!
Using industry experts grounded in the reality of travel management over many years in practice, we have developed effective and incisive tools that:
• Help analyse your spend patterns and critically examine your real costs with on-going assessments.
• Establish effective and proven ways of approaching the supply markets to ensure that the right product, service and value mixes are offered to you that fulfil broader price deals.
• Provide assistance and oversight to the transition to new and effective ways of controlling and monitoring expenditure against your travel programmes.
• Combine technology with effective supply-side management that deliver real and sustainable savings, even for those with modest budgets.
• Work in partnership with you, your employees and suppliers to ensure the best value for money is received through compliance of best practices and policy.
If you want to know more about how this can positively impact your organisation through the review of your business travel costs, arrange a free consultation with our Travel Management experts today.
Article by: Barry Donovan