According to Forbes, “happy employees are up to 20% more productive than unhappy employees.” Happiness has an even greater impact on salespeople. It’s shown to increase sales by as much as 37%.
But how can you ensure employee happiness when they’re out of office but still traveling for work? If you’ve ever traveled, business or leisure, you know that your mood sinks quickly when your flight is delayed, your card gets shut off for fraud, or you don’t make it to your destination with the luggage you started with at departure. Or any other number of things that can go wrong when traveling. Especially when you add the quick turnarounds and strict timeframes that traveling for work makes necessary.
It’s not easy keeping business travelers happy, and yet sales often depend on it.
What can you do to improve your team’s business travel experience?
Choose the right TMC.
At Gant, we believe in providing more than just the best experience for our travel managers and champions. We think a TMC should also offer solutions to keep travelers happy, too – because, simply put, an improved traveler experience IS an improved travel champion experience. Between our innovative technology and top-of-the-line customer service, Gant Travel equips companies with the tools to improve their employees’ business travel experience while still offering the program management tools to help keep costs down.
Technology
Our easy-to-use technology simplifies the travel process. We provide travelers with all the tools they need – including full SAP Concur Travel booking capabilities directly from their phone or tablet through our self-service portal.
“The Gateway speeds up travel management by providing a portal to accomplish some of the most time-consuming and disruptive challenges that travel managers, arrangers, and travelers face. It enhances the productivity of staff and travelers.” – Jenni Murer, CIO of Gant Travel
We offer travelers peace of mind through our automatic price-monitoring software that continues to search for lower airfares (through the void window) and hotel rates (through check-in) and, if it finds a lower price, it automatically secures it and makes no changes to the travelers existing reservation.
Travelers can also be confident that they know any about any and all alerts or notifications concerning their flight, sometimes even before the gate agent can get them announced. Our real-time messaging system alerts travelers as soon as the alert hits the system.
Customer Service
No matter how much planning goes into a trip, sometimes it just doesn’t quite go as planned. That’s why we have a full-service support team available 24/7.
Flight disruptions can occur at any time and we all know that’s a sure-fire way to make traveling employees unhappy. With our around-the-clock support team, travelers can call whenever their trip takes a turn for the worse and we’ll work to find a solution. Our knowledgeable and experienced agents can help with any changes your travelers need to make, in advance or on the fly, and they’re even trained to assist with first-tier SAP Concur Travel issues. Plus, we never charge any additional service fees to help with an existing reservation.
“I really like working with Gant. They’re so efficient and they are professional. Everything we ask of them they do in a timely manner.” -Current Client
Gant Strategic Pay (GSP)
Gant Travel strives to give our travelers the best experience possible, and that includes simplifying how non-cardholders check-in to hotels. It’s why we created Gant Strategic Pay (GSP).
GSP allows travelers to book a fully refundable hotel room with a corporate “ghost” card. This means that employees don’t have to put hotel charges on their personal cards or use a corporate card to pay for their stay, and no one on your team has to struggle with the outdated manual authorization form process. Our system automatically issues and sends the forms directly to the hotel and provides the traveler with a virtual card that can be downloaded to their phones. The single-use VCN then zeroes out on check-out.
With employee happiness being such a vital part of sales and productivity in business, we believe it’s important to go the extra mile for all travelers, not just those managing the program. We know that happy travelers make happy Travel Champions, and we want everyone to be happy with their travel experience.
