Managing New Pressures in a Knotty Travel Reality

Small and midsize companies have returned to travel at different speeds. But travel management in the small and midmarket no longer is about Covid-19 restrictions. New pressures like expanded responsibilities, intensive traveler re-education efforts and high travel costs are taking center stage. Ashley Furniture travel manager Connie Pronschinske, Benefitfocus travel manager Beth Ann Holbrook and Dynatrace global travel and meetings manager Karen Springfield Heslin spoke with BTN editorial director Elizabeth West about current travel program complexities in the midmarket as well as opportunities and expansions underway. 

Each of your companies decreased travel significantly during the pandemic. Tell me a little bit about that dynamic and where your companies are now.

Beth Ann Holbrook: Benefitfocus, because we are a benefits software-as-a-service company, has a definite high season for travel, which is in the summertime before open enrollment. Right now, I’d say we’re still considerably below our 2019 travel volume for that period. 

Connie Pronschinske: Ashley Furniture reduced travel during the pandemic—particularly at the height of the pandemic, when we really did cancel all travel. Outside of that window, we did continue to travel at what we called “restricted essential travel.” We had lower volumes, but it was important for our business to maintain travel to support a number of our facilities, and it proved important to our travel partnerships. Now, we’ve ramped up travel to essential travel, which includes our sales teams, but we are still keeping an eye on travel levels. 

Karen Springfield Heslin: Dynatrace has really grown as company during the pandemic. There’s been a huge demand for travel in the past six months since we reduced restrictions. I was brought in to build a cohesive travel program that was spread across nine agencies globally and didn’t really have a single global travel policy or robust duty of care plan. I’m currently in the [request-for-proposals] process to consolidate our program with one or two travel management companies so we can have better reporting and better overall management. As closely as I can track it at this point, our spend is a little more than it was in 2019, but we are also now a larger company than we were.  

It’s an interesting time, with high travel costs coming right out of depressed pandemic business travel volume. I get the feeling many SME Firms were ready to take the brakes off travel, but then came up against rising costs. 

Pronschinske: That’s exactly what happened with us. We actually were ramping up and saying, “Get back on the road!” And then when the rates started increasing—food prices increased, everything increased, you know, supplies, everything—we just kind of took a step back and to keep an eye on how we are traveling and still limit it to those essential travelers. 

Holbrook: Over the past two years, we’ve been more flexible with requests for people who did travel during the pandemic. For us, it was critical for them to get where they were going, and our volumes were low enough that some extra costs to ensure safety and security may not have registered as significantly to the budget. Since we’ve moved away from that interim pandemic travel policy—some of which I think we will keep, because they were good changes to travel approvals and some other things—but since we’ve basically moved away from those restrictions and have more travelers on the road, we are more cost-conscious. 

Springfield Heslin: There are a lot of complications right now, and the expense of travel is one of them. I do think there is a huge demand from travel—internal travel included—to see your clients, see your teams after all this time. We have to manage the cost of all that now. Once the dust settles, we have tools like virtual meetings and Zoom and other platforms that will help mitigate travel costs and we’ll need to put policies in place around when to travel and when travel can be avoided. With policies like that, I think there may be the possibility [for] higher-quality travel, but maybe the quantity of trips is lower than before. 

How do you see yourselves positioned with suppliers in a time where high costs seem to be prevailing? 

Holbrook: Most companies in our industry are up against 2019 volumes that simply aren’t back yet, and so naturally we’ve lost ground with some partnerships. But our partners have been great and as our travel increases, we’re able to rebuild.

Springfield Heslin: The fact that [the company] is growing by 30 to 35 percent annually is putting us in a great position to negotiate with TMCs as well as hotels. It’s an opportunity for potential partners to get in on the ground floor to build the relationship with us. Eventually, we will negotiate with airlines, but I would like to give it time first, so I have a better idea of our total spend and leverage.

Pronschinske: During the pandemic, we did actually go back to all our suppliers and reduce our costs because we still had that essential travel out there. [We were able to] reduce our hotel costs and some other areas as well. That said, I just had a big day with our vendors last week. And I knew it was coming, but they have to increase their rates. Ashley may have more of an advantage over companies that couldn’t maintain volume during the pandemic. I’m expecting we’ll probably have a small increase, but we probably will have offset that increase when we [initially] negotiated rates down. 

What about travelers getting back on the road? I’m hearing about a lot of re-education.

Holbrook: Before the pandemic, everyone knew what they were doing and where to go and how to get questions answered if they had tham. Now it’s back to more manual [assistance] where I’m helping people do more manual things than I ever did before.

Pronschinske: We continue to drive our travelers to preferred vendors during the pandemic, so I don’t see a real need to re-educate them about [that]. But we do need to communicate better with them now because of the complexities they will encounter on the road. We’ve been working with our travel management company, Fox World Travel, and they did a wonderful job helping us build better communications about tips and tricks travelers will need for their trips. We’ve also had discussions with them about getting information to travelers at the right time, leveraging mobile devices. So we are working on some new things.

Speaking of TMCs, we’ve been hearing mixed feedback on service levels overall. what has been your experience?

Springfield Heslin: I’ve actually made this one of the first questions on my RFP: How are your staffing levels, and how are you servicing clients right now? We are finding our current largest provider is having service issues. We’ve inquired about a VIP program, and they’ve been honest with us that they can’t offer it to us right now. I mean, they were very honest and candid, which I appreciate because that’s a better way to do it. They just don’t have the staff. 

Holbrook: If you had asked me this question a month ago, I would have had a different answer, but I am seeing improvement month over month with our travel management company. We’ve always had a great relationship with them and being the only travel manager at my company, I’ve really relied on them through this time. 

Has your role changed strategically in your company coming out of the pandemic?

Springfield Heslin: I’ve been with Dynatrace for six months, but I can tell you that the importance of managing travel has changed and that the company wants to look at travel much more strategically. It’s motivated by a lot of factors, but that’s why I’m here. It’s an amazing opportunity for me to build something new and effective. 

Pronschinske: I worked more closely with our department VPs during the pandemic, and I’m finding that they continue to be interested in travel—maybe because travel costs are so much higher now. But they come to me much more often for reporting to help support their business and they understand the value of travel management as a resource now more than they did before.