Since March 2020 things have been… interesting.
To say the least.
Around the globe...
Around our towns...
At school...
At work...
In business travel...
As we begin to wrap up yet another wild ride of a year, it’s clear that look-ahead travel-program planning is a whole new challenge in this post-pandemic world we live in.
While managing business travel as a whole remains heavily focused on new policy implementation and improved ROI, the disruptions and costs being considered are less straightforward than ever (or at least as far back as any of us can remember).
The increasingly dynamic nature of it all doesn’t look to be going anywhere anytime soon thanks to the combination of the rebound and a fast-paced, industry-wide process and technologies overhaul. There’s also the increased attention to Duty of Care and Risk Management – not surprising.
And we won’t even start in on the overall economic inflation and what it’s doing to pricing models and available discounts.
We might not have a crystal ball to predict what 2023 will bring in its entirety, but we do have enough industry experience to safely assume that managing business travel (especially with a whole team involved) isn’t going to get any easier any time soon.
While that’s a good reason to be hesitant about traveling without proper plans and support in place, we don’t think it’s a good enough reason to avoid hitting the road altogether.
That’s because business travel is fueled by more than just the desire to see the world or get out of the office for a day or two. It’s driven by the need to build relationships, collaborate with peers, and create new things. For some, it’s even a critical matter of business survival. Many of our clients report that a full return to the road is a must for them this year – they can’t pay bills and keep their doors open without it. When business travel is a must, managing business travel is also a must.
When it comes to something like managing business travel that’s both complex AND critical to your organization’s success – with detail after detail (after detail) requiring checks and double-checks – why would you want to do it all manually and on your own? Sounds stressful. And pointless.
Whether you’re a solo travel manager or one of several in your company that share the responsibilities while also doing other things, work is probably keeping you pretty busy right now. In fact, you probably don’t have any extra time, energy, or resources to waste. Unfortunately, without the support of a great travel management company (TMC), you are probably putting in more time, effort, and resources than you need to be without seeing the results you should/could. Without even realizing it.
TMCs (like Gant) are here to help your organization save money (also known as time, energy, and resources) when it comes to managing business travel.
Here’s 10 reasons why you’ll want to work with a TMC in 2023, even if you didn’t think you needed one before…
1. Have friend in the industry
It’s becoming increasingly difficult to know where to turn in an industry that doesn’t stop evolving. Can I apply this unused ticket to this trip? What about this one? Why was I charged for this upgrade? Is that even the right answer? Is there another flight out that will let me still catch my connection? Knowing who to call for answers or assistance is key to a successful program – and a successful business trp.
While many booking tools, suppliers and agencies continue to decrease their offerings for corporate programs, traveler support lines, and account management, we continue to recognize just how important it is to have someone in your corner who can help make sense of it all – and fix it when it goes wrong. Gant is committed to supporting our clients beyond their expectations. We take the time to get to know your team of travelers so we can find the right solutions for your program. Plus, we’ve developed the fail-safes and offer the agent support that travelers need when they’re out of the office on business.
2. Gain Access to Discounts
Industry experts predict that thanks to demand, inflation, and shortages costs will keep rising in 2023. If your team takes regular trips to specific locations (or one big trip to one location), negotiating rate agreements with preferred vendors will allow your travel spend to go further. Seems easy enough – unless you’re the one trying to figure out which properties might qualify for a discounted rate, who has all the amenities you need, how to secure the contract, and if an offered rate will actually help your team save your company money (sounds crazy… but sometimes they don’t).
At Gant, we can secure and load these contracts into our integrated systems on your behalf. Our goal is to help you save money whenever and wherever possible by combining our buying power with your expected volume. Gant Travel/FROSCH has excellent relationships or advisory-board membership with many of today’s leading consortia, hotels, airlines, and car rental companies. We will work with you to analyze travel data and identify opportunities for individual corporate rates. On top of that, our hotels team is constantly working to secure what we call “All-Gant” rates at properties around the world. By leveraging our large traveler base and industry connections, we’ve secured exclusive rates that all clients can utilize. For example, all your travelers will automatically receive 12% off at any Choice Hotels property.
3. Control the Process
The way we travel for work may be in a phase of constant change, but that doesn’t mean saving time or money is any less important than it used to be. As you work to manage your team travel spend, automation and a second set of eyes could prove priceless… and offer your company some hard-dollar savings too. Ongoing maintenance of policy to fit current booking behaviors, program goals, and traveler feedback can make a huge difference in your bottom line… and in your travelers’ willingness to follow policy at all.
Gant takes a consultative approach to policy, and we work with our clients to develop and implement a set of rules that work best for program needs. While some organizations choose to mandate, others prefer a more flexible process using policy to represent recommendation. In the Gant Gateway, we provide anytime analysis of your travel data to help identify areas that a policy update may have a positive impact on your ROI or traveler buy-in.
4. Get the Best Price
Travel costs are known to shift quickly – and regularly. It’s always been a challenge to determine the most economical time for reserving flights and booking hotel stays. As rates continue to fluctuate in-line with the status of traveler demands, staffing shortages, and supply issues, it’s become nearly impossible to find the cheapest price without 24/7 tracking capabilities. This becomes an even bigger concern with the industry’s shift to the New Distribution Capability (NDC) and the continuous pricing models that airlines are introducing through it.
From the time of ticketing to the day of arrival, Fare Guardian™ and Rate Guardian™, our intelligent cost-tracking technology, work behind the scenes to monitor all air and hotel reservations. When the automated system identifies a savings opportunity that works in an itinerary without making changes to anything other than price, it instantly secures that new price and sends the traveler an emailed alert. We’re working diligently in the background with our GDS and other travel partners to offer NDC content to our clients in short order.
5. Improve Self-Service Capabilities
There are some things you may prefer to handle on your own. Disruptions and program changes often happen in the blink of an eye (at the most inconvenient hours), and when they do, successful maneuvers may be fully dependent on what systems are available to you and what access you have. Opening 6 different programs to make one small adjustment isn’t likely to make that ‘quick change’ an actual quick change. Tech-driven TMCs help bring together disparate travel platforms to allow for simple one-system management of programs, some with advanced self-service capabilities. In this ever-changing industry, travel managers need quick access to view and edit their travel program – wherever they are and from whatever device they have available.
The Gant Gateway provides our clients with easy, anytime access to our long list of fully integrated travel tools. With our self-service “command center,” travel admins can add, edit, delete, and manage integral parts of their program like reporting, analytics, traveler profiles, and policy changes. Gant Together, our solution for meeting/event travel management, and GSP, our automated virtual card solution, are in there too. Available through your browser on desktop or as a mobile app, travel managers can work whenever (and wherever) they need to.
6. Offer Travelers 24/7 Support
When plans go awry (and they inevitably will for one reason or another), the current landscape of over-busy and under-staffed airports, at-capacity flights, and booked-full hotels mean you to have a “plan B” in an instant. Even if it’s the middle of the night. While after-hours agents can’t stop flights from being delayed or hotels from losing reservations – and they certainly can’t do anything about the lingering effects of the pandemic – they can be the voice on the other end of the line when it matters most.
Gant agents train to solve a variety of travel issues within just a few minutes. The routing systems we have in place allow them to prioritize urgent calls and get you back out there quickly. Not only do we strive to keep our average hold-times down, but we do so while still spending around seven minutes on the phone with every traveler to ensure the highest-level of service.
7. Manage Unused Air Tickets
Cancelled air tickets are more rule than exception post pandemic, and just how instrumental the proper management of those vouchers – existing program assets if you will – could be in saving your organization time and money has become obvious. Unused ticket vouchers represent money already spent – and making use of that spent money is critical to maintaining your budget. What makes it so hard/so important to track? Vouchers are issued in the name of the traveler. Meaning if you aren’t keeping track of what’s out there and how much the voucher is worth, the value could be funding your employee’s Mexico family vacation instead of a work-related trip. You could also be missing out on recouping those funds if your employees aren’t using available waivers or cancelling properly.
Gant offers simple, automated solutions to help you track and apply waivers as well as get total value utilization of your voucher credits. Our Perfect Waiver interacts with airline information to identify and document PNRs that may qualify for a waiver. We’re even able to resend unused tickets back through the system when waiver updates are made to ensure we’re attaching the newest, best waiver available for that ticket. Our TicketRetriever process for unused tickets is fully integrated with our systems, allowing complete visibility regardless of whether that data is accessed through our reporting, the online booking tool, the Gant Gateway, or any of our full-service agents. Travel managers can view a detailed list of all available, expired, and used vouchers within their organization and even reassign tickets to other employees when needed. A must when managing business travel.
8. Provide non-cardholder solutions
Travelers and teams are embracing remote models and better technology is required to establish secure pathways that will prevent fraud and protect sensitive information now that everything (and everyone) doesn’t run through one main address.
- Not everyone that may travel for your company has a company card.
- Forking over personal funds for work trips and then waiting for reimbursement may not even be in the realm of possibility for some employees.
- Faxed authorization forms almost always lead to needing a replacement card.
- Hotels lose authorization forms all the time.
There are plenty of reasons to offer travelers a virtual payment option for their hotel stays. Recent surveys found that “37 percent of travel buyers report using virtual payments in their program for some travel, and a majority said virtual card use would expand over the next five years.”
With Gant Strategic Pay, when your traveler books a fully refundable hotel room on a corporate “ghost” card, our system issues and sends the authorization forms directly to the property automatically – regardless of whether the traveler books online or with a Gant full-service agent. Because each individual virtual card can only be applied to one reservation, travel managers can fund a hotel stay without having to give the traveler or the vendor access to the organization’s corporate card.
9. Have reliable data
Data has always played a significant role in managing a travel program. During the pandemic that role expanded dramatically. Tracking cancellations, airline vouchers and waivers, overall spend, and more went from “important for highly-managed travel programs” to “a must for any travel program.” Largely because Duty of Care is on the forefront of everyone’s minds, but also because many travel budgets (and budgets in general) are much tighter than ever before. Keeping track of all these items requires access to data – lots of it. And not just access to data, but easy access to robust, clean data with expert-level analytics to help you understand what all that raw data means to a program and policy.
Gant is working to answer this call with live data dashboards, designed analytics, 24/7 access, custom data mapping, and AI-powered insights to help make the job of the managing business travel just a little easier.
10. See your ROI
And also, hopefully, improve your ROI. When you don’t check in on your travel spend on a regular basis, it can be easy for savings opportunities to slip through the cracks. Most things travel-program related come down to the ROI, and if you aren’t keeping track of what you’re spending, saving, and taking advantage of… how do you know what your ROI is? How will you know if you are properly managing business travel for your team? More importantly – how do you prove it to the people that approve your budget?
At least twice a year our dedicated account managers will reach out to discuss current program wins and losses, ensure your travelers are using the tools you have provided, analyze trends and patterns in your travelers’ behaviors, and help you make any needed adjustments to your policy. You can even export our Business Review in a prebuilt PowerPoint that includes industry and Gant’s all-client benchmarking.
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Ready to get started with Gant? Reach out to us at [email protected].
Not quite convinced yet? Check out our other recent blog posts linked here and here to see what else we can do for your travel program.
