As all but essential travel and meetings quickly bites, now is a great opportunity to ensure your policy, programme and effective buying is fit for purpose, and plan ahead for when travel and meetings resume back to normal.
Over the coming weeks, Steve Banks, Director of Customer Experience at NYS and Capita Travel and Events will share a number of areas that can be reviewed more closely. The relevance will often be based on an organisation’s maturity of buying; its industry sector, what it buys, and what drives the requirement for travel and meetings. To kick this off, here are some simple areas to look at:
Use the time to evaluate effective alternatives to meeting face-to-face that you may be currently utilising. For example, are your technology alternatives fit for purpose, available at scale and be better enabled as part of a business as usual strategy when ready?
Review your policies. Do you have leakage from your preferred route to market – if you do, why? And what can you do about it?
Meetings are at the heart of travel, yet many organisations know what they spend and where they spend it, but what is missing is how or why or what influences a meeting; its frequency, its location, and who attends. We suggest you take this opportunity to engage with your bookers, decision makers and travellers and review your user engagement audience to understand what this could look like over the coming months so that you can make adjustments where necessary.
Look at all travel related commodities you spend across travel, strategic meetings management and events – how many different routes to market do you have? Can you be more efficient? Are there benefits to consolidating your buying?
Review your end to end travel and meetings buying, these include planning, booking, customer experience, payment, reconciliation and future strategy. The chances are there will be opportunities to work smarter, so work with your agent to target priorities that reduce costs, and enhance the travel experience through the help of a better travel buying process.