Corporate Travel Policy: Benchmarking and Insight (Egencia)

Описание: Corporate Travel Policy: Benchmarking and Insight (Egencia)

Did you know that last year a North American company that spends $1M each year on airline tickets, with an 80-20 split between domestic and international trips, could reduce costs by up to $612,000, or 61.2%, by managing travel through a well designed policy?

What else did we learn from this study? Here are just a few tidbits...

The survey confirmed a common complaint among Travel Managers. Sixty-two percent of them described their travel policies more as 'guidelines' than mandates. Similarly, 67% averred that there are no, or very limited, consequences for violating travel policies.

Consistent with recognized best practices in travel management, most travel managers have recently reviewed, or are in the process of reviewing, their travel policies. In fact, only 14% report that they have not reviewed their policy in more than two years, and only 2% have no plans to do so. The changes made have tilted the balance away from 'comfort and convenience,' and more toward cost control. Specifically, 67% of the respondents who have made changes to their policy took the opportunity to restrict business class air travel.

Online booking also is firmly established as a best practice. Sixty-six percent of respondents require travelers to book some or all trips through corporate Online Booking Tools (OBT). Again, this is most pronounced at larger organizations. Rules requiring domestic flights to be booked online are in place at 94% of organizations that mandate use of such tools, and almost half of that group require international flights and hotels to be booked through an OBT.

Ninety-three percent of respondents have policy rules that require travelers to accept lower fare options under certain circumstances. The rest use a combination of rules to define the 'Lowest Logical Fare,' (LLF) that must be accepted by travelers. The key components of LLF rules, and the percentage of respondents who use each one are:

• Time Windows: flights that depart before or after a requested time (83%).
• Non-refundables: required instead of more flexible fares when available (70%).
• Connections: required if they don't extend travel time unreasonably (58%).
• Alternate Airports: encouraged if reasonably near travelers' airports (54%).