Travel
Travel is a diverse category which tends to generate an emotional response from large numbers of individual users. As a result, many firms avoid looking too hard for cost savings in this area. Travel is a combination of a number of different sub-categories which makes one single strategy hard to implement.
The following are typical key areas for delivering savings in travel, though they are necessarily interlinked:
- Travel agent / TMC fees and deals
- Hotel spend
- Flights spend
- Car hire spend
- Rail spend
- Travel policies
Some of the challenges we typically find in this area include:
- Travel is an emotional category, and has a direct effect on how an employee sees themselves valued by the company
- Purchasing control is over a vast number of individuals
- Travel is actually a combination of multiple different categories
- Environmental considerations often have to be taken into account
- Travel is an international category with all the additional complexities that this adds
- Travel is a data intensive area and analysis can become very complex
- Policy compliance is a fine balance which if done poorly can result in massive overspend and alienation of the workforce