The Shift Toward Traveler-Centric Travel Management

"We want to understand their sentiment: Why they travel, do they enjoy it, what's important, how do they travel? That is the starting place. Fundamentally, a travel program starts with the traveler."

That's the advice of Festive Road managing partner and former AstraZeneca global travel management lead Caroline Strachan, who said clients have engaged her consulting firm for "listening exercises" more often in the past year. "We are doing this for a number of clients. Our goal is to show the industry that if you will listen to your travelers and build a program around that, you don't have to worry about compliance."

That may be an uncomfortable proposition for companies that have approached travel management from a rules-centric, cost-saving position. As managed travelers have more choice at their fingertips and higher expectations—in terms of personalized customer service and work-life balance, for example—companies are moving slowly toward a traveler-centric model.

A recent study from the Association of Corporate Travel Executives and American Express Global Business Travel suggested that companies with a younger average employee—think technology companies and large accounting and consulting firms, among others—lead the way in injecting HR-oriented perspectives into travel policies and processes.

Nearly one-third of these "younger" companies considered recruitment and retention strategies part and parcel of the travel program strategy. Among "older" companies, i.e., those with an average employee over 40 years old, that HR-orientation for travel dropped to just 11 percent.

That's not to say that 30 percent of these "younger" companies are putting travel management in the hands of HR, though some undoubtedly do. It's simply that these companies, especially those in competitive industries, align travel with bigger-picture goals rather than focusing on savings at all cost.

That "bigger-picture" transformation is underway for one Festive Road pharmaceutical client, according to Strachan. Struggling with leakage and rogue travelers, the company took a step back. After the in-depth listening exercise, "the company realized they were going to have to fundamentally shift the focus of their program," said Strachan. "For example, their hotel contracts were not with the types of suppliers their travelers were interested in. And it wasnt that they wanted luxury; they weren't expecting Four Seasons or Ritz-Carlton. They just wanted things like convenient locations to their meetings and onsite gyms. So progress wasn't about spending more, it was about understanding more."

The Traveler Happiness Index

In May, BTN launched an online survey tool to help travel managers listen to the voice of the traveler. An extension of the 2016 Traveler Happiness Index that BTN fielded to a list of qualified business travelers, the tool allowed BTN to target the managed travel segment more specifically.

Each qualified travel manager registered for a customized link to the online survey that allows his or her business travelers to rate the importance of 23 "trip factors" along the pre-trip, on-trip, post-trip lifecycle to discover what that travel population cares about most. Further, the survey asks travelers to rate their companies on the "effective delivery" of each trip factor, giving travel managers insight not only into what is important but also into delivery gaps that need to be addressed the most.

Ultimately, each participating company is assigned a Traveler Happiness Index score on a scale of 1 to 100, based on all survey respondents from that company. An index of 50 indicates "neutral" satisfaction. Each participating travel manager accessed his or her own confidential survey results through the tool. The tool remains available and the survey is ongoing, and BTN used total results from all participating companies as of Sept. 15 to offer a snapshot of managed traveler happiness overall in this issue.

Having aggregated the ratings of all participants in the 2017 Traveler Happiness survey, BTN found that managed travelers pegged their happiness at 57 on the index. This shows that many companies have not yet adopted some of the more traveler-centric practices in structuring programs and policies. This year, BTN dug deeper into the Traveler Happiness survey, segmenting results in five different ways: by policy strength, by trip frequency, by international trip volume, by age and by gender.

The least happy travelers among this year's participants were the ones who had the least support. This group indicated they had few or no policy guidelines. They painted a picture in which they were casting about for the tools and processes needed to book and execute a business trip. Given that BTN surveyed only managed travelers, this group was small at just 2.5 percent of all participants. They seemed to lack awareness of an existing program, despite the fact that many of them traveled regularly—and that their travel managers sent them the survey!

Clear concerns emerged across the board, though. Namely, the lack of quality shopping and booking tools for business travel, the desire for more convenient travel choices, an easier expense process and a nagging desire for better work-life balance. (Story continues below.)

2017 Traveler Happiness Index Results

The Voice of the Traveler

Survey numbers can go only so far in offering insights into travelers' true motivations. With that in mind, BTN engaged 30 business travelers themselves in a series of in-depth interviews to understand not only how they travel and what frustrates them about their companies' required processes and programs but also about what they appreciate in terms of business travel and what would make their traveling lives better.

Aggregation of this feedback showed vast differences in corporate attitudes toward travel, from the relative luxury travel afforded to finance executives to the scrappier budget-oriented programs that govern journalists going after a story and even draconian policies heaped on an HR professional whose job has him on the road nearly 90 percent of the time, including weekends.

Many of the travelers' comments reflected similar issues to those revealed in the online survey. Their stories are just as important, though, showing the real-life effects of travel programs that the survey could not show and clearly projecting how a company's policies and processes around travel influence an employee's satisfaction with his or her job.

The travelers' stories also reveal a drive to be productive contributors to the businesses of which they are a part, and in some cases they have practical recommendations for their companies to support that drive. So travel managers, HR professionals and procurement officers need to listen and work together to design travel programs that meet business needs, support productivity and offer some personal choice for travelers. The big question is how. What is the most effective way to listen to travelers?

BTN's Traveler Happiness Index tool is one good place to start. It's free. Internal social media communities also can be a positive, low-cost first step. PwC, Salesforce, Liberty Mutual Insurance, Microsoft and a host of other companies have built active online feedback channels that encourage travelers to communicate with the travel department or even assist other travelers who crowdsource questions.

Microsoft and IBM are taking the voice of the traveler concept to the next level. Both are engaging with HR on retention and recruitment issues and both are leveraging sophisticated technologies to support their leading-edge efforts.

Microsoft is harnessing multiple sources of data—including traditional travel, card and expense data; supplier data; and even unstructured data from its social media channel—and applying machine learning to the mix. The ultimate goal is to use the data to create a "digital picture" of the technology giant's 75,000 travelers and then segment them into four traveler types. Microsoft plans to use these traveler types to negotiate relevant contracts and special offers with suppliers that will support and motivate each group. Microsoft also has launched a destination experience platform that leverages and distributes individual traveler knowledge to the broader Microsoft traveler community.

IBM is concentrating on a chatbot concierge powered by Watson's artificial intelligence. The idea grew out of a traveler forum the company created as a communication vehicle to support a large change management initiative. Now, it will be dedicated to supporting the traveler experience.

Discovery Communications is taking a different approach, global travel services VP Yukari Tortorich told a recent audience at The Beat Live conference. She's actively engaging groups of travelers in pilot programs to test emerging technologies for the travel program, thereby giving them a voice in some exciting transformation opportunities that are manageable in scale but still meaningful.

There's no single path to success, but continuing to overlook the traveler as a fundamental stakeholder will leave a travel program going nowhere fast.