Let’s talk about the person on your team that partners with us the most.
The Travel Champion.
While many are in fact travel arrangers, travel managers, and even travel champions, there are many others for whom the word travel isn’t necessarily in their official job titles or descriptions – they are Executive Assistants, CFOs, CEOs, part of the finance or accounting team, Sales Directors, and any number of other non-travel specific positions.
Regardless of their official position, they’re the ones that willfully undertake (or accidentally inherit) the demands of their organization’s business travel program.
We consider all of them Champions, because they’re the ones championing their travel programs.
Travel champion (trav-el cham-pi-on): noun. A person who takes substantial interest in the adoption, implementation, and success of their organization’s travel program and policy. The champion advocates for improvement against any enduring internal resistance. See also: change agent.
Champions spend time directing, maintaining, and administering a travel program.
They’re the ones handling disruptions and making strategic adjustments to improve spend and ROI.
The ones whose job seems to change daily.
Those on a perpetual mission to explain the ever-evolving nuances of business travel to the rest of their team.
The ones taking care of their travelers; the ones guarding their company’s T&E budget.
The Champion role continues to grow and adapt as technology and the travel landscape evolve.
This evolution continues to move the position away from being an agent for policing and enforcing policy to one of active strategy, budgeting control, and duty of care implementation that blurs the line between what’s best for an organization’s budget and what’s best for their traveler.
They’re always on the lookout for a better and easier way to do it all.
So are we.
The Travel Champion serves as a voice, both mediator and moderator, for the accounting team, the executive team, and the entire travelling team as we partner together with them to help make their specific program goals a reality. Our goal at Gant is to provide the support, expertise, data, services and technology needed for Champions to take control of their travel program and maintain its success with as little frustration and wasted time as possible.
Every project starts with a kick-off meeting.
We want to make sure we fully understand the needs and requirements of your travel program before we make a plan for implementation. We use this time to ask questions, let you ask questions, and advise on best practices. We’ll walk you through policy options, guide you in developing a plan for training, and determine the necessary timeline. From there, our account management team will take you through a semi-structured timeline (Gant GO) developed to help you gain traction through the first 90 days your site is live. They’ll help you leverage our knowledge and experience to define, plan, execute, and deploy your new, centralized travel program.
Better Account Support.
We form long-standing relationships with our Champions, helping them to manage, adapt, and perfect their programs month after month, and year after year.
STRATEGY / BEST PRACTICES
Gant works with you and your team to help develop a comprehensive understanding of your specific organizational needs. Through a series of calls, meetings, and scoping documents, we aid in the creation and management of a travel policy that aligns with your budgetary and program goals.
ANALYSIS / REVIEWS
Your Gant Gateway portal offers an in-depth look at your travel data that can be used to discuss and review wins/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.
NEGOTIATIONS / RENEGOTIATIONS
Our Account Management team provides ongoing program support and spend analysis, allowing us to leverage every opportunity for further optimization. We understand that your organization’s travel needs may change over time, and we strive to remain proactive, making small and frequent changes based on reported travel data and program analytics.
Better Reservation Visibility
As a travel management company, it’s our job to equip you with the information you need to understand your travel spend. We offer robust dashboards and tools powered by live reservation data (some with COVID-19 case total integrated directly into the trip detail) so you can manage your program in real-time.
Champion Dashboard
Designed specifically to actively monitor a program in light of COVID-19 Duty of Care and budgetary concerns, this dashboard offers quick access to the who, what, where, when, how, and how much of your travel program. At a glance, you can see where your travelers are going, have been, and aren’t going because they cancelled. Plus, the dashboard has current and past week integration of state-level COVID case data tied directly to the reservation detail line for timely decisions and follow-up.
Travelers on the Road
Created to supplement your Duty of Care and Risk Management programs, Gant’s Travelers On The Road (Travelers OTR) tool provides our Champions with a thirty-day, geo-mapped view of where and when their travelers will be checking-in, checking-out, departing, connecting, and arriving for all air and hotel reservation. Whether you need to view travelers by location, date, or both, our Travelers OTR service can help you stay ahead of impending travel risks.
Better Self-Service Access
The Gant Gateway provides easy access to our long list of fully integrated travel tools, plus single-sign-on access for items such as invoices, itineraries, and expense reports.
Data and Reporting
We’ve always recognized the important role reporting plays in well-run travel programs, and we’ve offered bi-annual business reviews and over 100+ standard reports to our clients for a while now. Since the COVID-19 outbreak, our data and tech teams have redesigned our standard offering to include live-data dashboards for everyone making decisions about your travel program. Gant Reporting – Insights and Data (GRID) includes a rolling-12-month look at account spend totals and analysis, a YTD deck for accounting teams, and a YTD/current travel dashboard (with integrated COVID case data) for our Champions.
Available upgrades for GRID include in-dashboard data drilldown (SMART GRID) and custom filters and global roll-up (POWER GRID).
Unused Ticket Management
Our TicketRetriever service streamlines unused ticket management and allows our champions to effectively apply value that has previously gone untracked and unused. The exclusive four-tiered process is fully integrated with our systems, allowing visibility/usability regardless of whether vouchers are accessed through our monthly reporting broadcast, the online booking tool, the Gant Gateway, or any of our full-service agents. Champions can even reassign unused tickets to anyone else in their organization directly from the Gateway.
We’ve recently added the automatic attachment of any available waivers codes to ensure our agents have instant access to the newest and best when applying the voucher to a new reservation.
Meetings and Events
With Gant Together, our groundbreaking solution to corporate meeting travel, planners can keep their focus on what matters most: the meeting itself. Gant has developed an end-to-end
meetings platform defined by its simple, flexible experience for both organizers and travelers alike and placed it right in the Gant Gateway alongside the rest of your travel program.
With in-person, virtual, and hybrid capabilities, Gant Together’s customizable components allow planners to efficiently manage and monitor workflows like: applying unlimited meeting-level policy, easily inviting profiled AND non-profiled attendees, tracking registrations and reservations, monitoring meeting budgets, and more. It also boasts a user-friendly interface and full-service agent support is always available.
Program Policy
Travel policy isn’t a “set it and forget it” set of rules for most organizations. Champions work diligently to improve travel-spend ROI and adjust duty of care measures based on current travel climate, and that requires policy remain dynamic and capable of frequent shifts. To make this regular tweaking a little easier on our champions, we’ve given them anytime access to update, add, edit, view, and deactivate program policy.
Vendor Programs
Preferred supplier relationships and negotiated rates can be key in keeping travel spend down while still offering your team the business travel experience they need and want. To make it easy to track and manage vendor programs, we’ve placed them in the Gant Gateway and granted Champions access to add, edit, view, and deactivate vendor programs anytime.
My Travelers
For Champions who are also travel arrangers for others, our “Act as User” capabilities in the Gateway allow easy toggling between traveler accounts with full access to book travel, pull invoices, update profiles, and more. Arranger access is granted by the traveler and can be assigned to non-Champion profiled travelers as well.
We’ll help you (re)negotiate great rates with the vendors and properties your travelers frequent the most.
We’ll help you analyze your travel data to pinpoint opportunities at least twice a year. Plus, we’ll help you negotiate great rates with the vendors and properties your travelers frequent the most and help you analyze your travel data to pinpoint opportunities. We offer day-one access to our own Gant-negotiated or consortium rates for other hotels, rental cars, and airlines where your travelers book less frequently.
VENDOR DISCOUNTS
By leveraging our large traveler base and industry connections, we have the buying power to negotiate deals with many leading suppliers
all around the world, giving our clients access to supplemental savings they might not have the power to negotiate on their own.
Our discounts combined with our account-level negotiating assistance, offer added savings – and often extra amenities – without putting the
time-consuming contracting process on you or your team.
