20 minute read
WHY TMCS ARE WORTH THEIR WEIGHT IN GOLD
WORDS TOM OTLEY
WORTH THEIR WEIGHT IN GOLD
As travel has been dramatically disrupted throughout the pandemic, TMCs have been uniquely placed to proactively ensure travellers can continue with their journeys
Many of us organise our own travel, but the past two years of disruption has played havoc with even the best-laid plans. Whereas you might have onc e, at leisure, researched your own ight options and chosen an airline or a routing that suited, now the memory of cancelled ights and an hour on hold trying to rearrange can give you pause for thought. e di culties have brought the role of travel management companies (TMCs) to the fore. Simone
Buckley, vice-president of EMEA marketing at Tripactions, sums up the current situation: “Travel is more complicated,” she says. “ ere is such volatility at the moment with ight schedules which leads to things changing so quickly.”
Buckley says that the airlines’ dynamic pricing revenue management systems mean when things change, they change rapidly, so a traveller needs “the broadest amount of information and depth of content to choose from when making decisions”.
“It’s not just about the fares, although getting a good price is important. It’s also about getting the right fare that you can change.
You are not always given that information when you go direct [to the airline], but if you are using a travel management company you will have it.”
Mark Smith, chief executive of
Simplexity, agrees: “ ere will always be cheap deals online, but you’ll see the value of a TMC when something goes wrong. rough this period we have had many phone calls from people who had already booked their ights, and were having problems and saying, ‘We wish we’d booked through you.’ We did what we could to help them. Hopefully they’ll remember us next time.”
Steve Banks, chief commercial o cer at Agiito, says, “Over the last 20 months we have never worked so hard for so little. Whether the right commercial arrangements are in place with some customers is another matter, but Covid has ampli ed the need for a good agent more than ever. A good TMC will have kept its customers well informed and been an arbitrator between fact and ction. We stayed close to our customers and good communication was important.”
Communication has been of paramount importance. Reed and Mackay says that on 94 per cent 5 REASONS FOR USING A TMC of occasions, it ■ Meeting duty-of-care obligations to has proactively employees when they are travelling; called clients ■ Providing expert service support, before they such as 24/7 helplines, to get clients called with a out of “di icult situations”; problem. Gary ■ Giving access to competitive Povey is head airfares and hotel rates that the of sales. He independent traveller can’t book; says: “People ■ Allowing visibility and control want more over how much organisations reassurance. spend on travel; We were looking ■ Helping you avoid the hassle of at an average trying – and failing – to get hold of client time of someone at the airline. of around 15 minutes for an o ine booking. It is now closer to 45 minutes.”
Steve Norris, managing director of Flight Centre Travel Group, backs this up. “We are speaking to people three times as much as we did pre-Covid, but there is so much confusion out there with testing regimes, changing fees on the fares and added to that in the background, Brexit with visas.” As Norris puts it, “In the end, something will go wrong, and while you can’t predict it, at least there’s someone at hand ready to solve whatever the problem is.”
THE PRICE IS RIGHT
TMCs charge a fee, of course, and assessing whether this makes sense for you will involve balancing a number of factors. Firstly, you should consider the saving in time you will make in having someone else research your travel options, or at least provide the information in a useful dashboard in an Online Booking Tool (OBT). Some might say that takes the fun out of it, since many of us enjoyed the research and conveniently forgot what we could/should have been doing in terms of work. e pandemic, however, has made the process more complex and time-consuming, and when things change, spending an hour on hold trying to get through to an airline only to be cut o at the 61st minute isn’t much of a laugh. Secondly, if your ight is cancelled, there’s also the chance that the TMC may have more luck than you in getting a refund or credit note.
“You would still have the same ticketing rules if you bought the ticket through a TMC than if you bought it direct from the airline,” says Smith, “but where we have an account manager in the airline we can be of far more help to the customer than just them phoning an 0844 number and being on hold. And you don’t need to deal with the stress of trying to get through to the airline.”
It’s also a matter of knowing the customer’s rights. “If a ight is cancelled, you are entitled to a full refund,” Smith adds. “Unfortunately, airlines o er credit vouchers or move it to another day, but if it’s cancelled you are entitled to a refund. Likewise if they change the times and it’s over a certain length of time, then that’s a full refund. We can also re-validate some ights for the same price when customers might have been quoted hundreds of pounds to do so.”
In general, TMCs say they are able to secure a better price on many airfares, or nd a more appropriate one since they are buying ights and hotel rooms for many clients so can negotiate better rates. Norris says that TMCs’ ability to access and display a wide choice of air fares and content will secure the traveller a good price.
“We look to give people the average benchmark fare on the routes people are wanting, so they get a better overall knowledge. With more than $20 billion of customer money being spent, it helps us secure leverage on the fares from the airlines, so even with booking fees we will be able to save them money and we can track those savings.”
FCM, which has Flight Centre as one of its brands, sells tickets from simple air fares through its shops up to small and medium size enterprises (SMEs), for which it has the Corporate Traveller brand in the UK, and then FCM Travel Management for larger enterprises.
Flight Centre’s Norris says, “Because of the name Flight Centre people come to us for a cheap flight, and then go off and find their car hire and accommodation separately. But for a company, the challenge is that you won’t know where your people are when they are out of the office, and on the financial side you will be missing out by not consolidating your spending power. If you book it all together, you will be consolidating and it is the beginning of management information. We say that even if you only book 75 per cent with us, ask your travellers to plug the rest in to the system so as a management team you can keep track of things from a duty-of-care point of view.”
SAFETY AND SECURITY
‘Management information’ is shorthand for everything from consolidating spend to duty-of-care, and that duty, while it has always been important, is more so now than ever with the restrictions and
“There’s the reactive and the proactive,” says Agiito’s Banks. “The reactive is consequential actions that the cancellation might have, so does the traveller need a new onward connection or a hotel room for the night? Contacting an airline can be difficult at the moment as we all know. We can give them a pragmatic alternative or choice of options.”
Many of us have given up trying to get through to airlines so any way of actually speaking with someone who can help is at a premium. Do TMCs have a special ‘hot line’? “There are trade phone lines,” says Banks, “and there are still good old-fashioned airline reps, but they are few and far between, so you still have fewer lines and fewer people supporting a greater number of agents. We can still get a lot of information from the GDS system, and as long as we own the PNR [Passenger Name Record] it’s absolutely fine, so perversely we say don’t try and do it yourself we can do it quicker and better, because people are just overloading the telephone lines. No airlines are equipped to take large volumes of telephone calls anymore. It can be infuriating.”
risks of Covid. One of the many worries of travellers is testing positive while away on a trip and then being stuck away from home, possibly in quarantine. TMCs can’t help you avoid quarantine, though several say they have planned itineraries for travellers which minimised the risks, simply by taking a different routing back to the UK.
Reed and Mackay’s Povey says, “Communication is important. We should know through the technology about a flight being cancelled, so we have the information earlier. We might put them in a hotel overnight because that’s the only option, or there are five seats on another flight and we secure one of those before the other 350 people on the flight realise what’s happened. Or you are flying into New York JFK and we can see that the flight is delayed going into JFK so they are going to miss their connecting flight and we can get in touch with their PA and make arrangements to rebook and reroute so that lessens most of the stress of the situation.”
Typically, things tend to go wrong not when you are sitting at your desk with a laptop and a strong internet connection but when you have a half-dead phone with patchy signal late at night or early in the morning when call centres are closed.
THE FUTURE OF BUSINESS TRAVEL
There have been many headlines over the past two years saying business travel has changed forever as a result of the pandemic, and many corporates have said they will cut travel in the future. The TMCs we have spoken to distinguish PSYCHOLOGY between large companies and small and medium size enterprises (SMEs). The The balance between former are slower to begin to travel at volume, the latter are ready to travel now. technology and personal touch
Steve Banks, chief commercial officer at Agiito, says, “A lot of trips have been will be decided not just by your replaced by virtual meetings and every organisation has had to take a cautious budget, but also the psychology of the approach to travel so the decision and willingness around travel now sits with the individual. travellers, argues Norris. Smaller companies are coming back more quickly. Large organisations have risk departments “The first thing we would do is look and where any risk exists they do everything possible to mitigate it. The biggest issue we’ve had at the travellers and their psychology with Covid is how do you quantify the risk, and brand reputation is taken very seriously as well, and that of the business. If it is a large, so companies become risk averse and inhibit travel returning as quickly as it could do.” traditional business with the heavy
Gary Povey, head of sales at Reed and Mackay, says, “The bigger enterprise clients will be travellers being technophobes then slower to get back the level of travel they had before. The SMEs are already travelling. Overall asking them to book and manage I think it will be 2025 before we get back to that level, but at the same time we are bringing new their own travel with very little business on because clients have been let down by existing players.” support would be a complete failing. If it is a start-up business with
young people who would consume everything through their mobile phones, then that’s a different culture, and so we have technology, such as our new travel booking and management platform, Melon.”
TECHNOLOGY
All TMCs offer technology, and will be able to have you and your fellow travellers booking their travel through an OBT within a few days. But the level of support you can expect behind that technology will differ from company to company.
“A lot of people say we have got great technology and people in the background if they are needed,” says Povey, “But for us it’s the other way round. We’ve built our technology around the requirements of our consultants who deal with some very complex needs from clients, so it has information on past trips, business profiles and the approval flow on a single screen to help them understand the clients. We believe people want to use a TMC because they have a requirement for high-touch travel management and with us they have that reassurance they are speaking to an expert in a very complex travel world, and that was even before Covid. We want people to be productive. It all has to show a return on investment, which might be a cost reduction or a time reduction.”
A different approach is taken by Tripactions, which Buckley says is more of a Software as Service offering. “We are technology-led making it as easy as possible for you to do it for yourself. The platform gives you lots of options for your trips with full visibility and pricing, not just with the one airline but the breadth and depth of content, and it is just as easy to book on our technology as it is on the airline’s website, and with our recent announcement with Lufthansa, you can even earn and redeem Miles and More points. Yet if something goes wrong, you can still ask us for help, so you have that back-up.”
Buckley says that the focus on technology means that when things changed quickly during Covid, the focus on improving the technology was a major benefit for customers. “At one point we had as many developers in the business as we did travel agents because developers can change things so that over the weekend we integrated Sherpa [which has the Covid rules and regulations] and created the dashboard of what was happening around the world. We keep a close watch on what’s happening on the front end [of the technology platform] and make sure we can deal with it in technology terms. We developed around 80 new products or product enhancements over a 12-month period in 2020-21.”
Simplexity’s Smith says that while in the past the technology was perhaps a reason to consider a larger TMC that is no longer the case. “Smaller TMCs have the same tools as the big TMCs. I have an online booking tool (POBT) the same as them, with mobile messaging the same as the large TMCs.
“It’s not the technology that makes up the difference in size, it’s the size of the corporate accounts. If a huge
BUSINESS TRAVEL TRENDS FOR 2022
BALANCING VIRTUAL AND IN-PERSON MEETINGS Companies are reviewing the value of sending employees on business trips. Employees value travel for the opportunities presented by in-person meetings with colleagues, clients and business partners, but travel programmes need to adjust to the new ways of working created by the pandemic.
ENVIRONMENTAL SUSTAINABLITY Companies are engaging with sustainability, and travel managers are exploring ways to reduce their programme’s carbon footprint. Many TMCs will have reporting tools to help companies accurately report on business travel emissions across air, hotel, car and rail.
NEW WORKER EXPECTATIONS The transition to remote settings is rapidly changing the way we work and travel. Companies need to adjust workplace policies to the needs of digital nomads and hybrid employees, firmly placing them on the people risk management agenda.
PEOPLE RISK MANAGEMENT More remote and hybrid working means companies must extend their dutyof-care to employees whenever they are out of the office; not just when they’re on a business trip.
A BROADER SET OF RISKS As travel returns, risks, such as extreme weather events, terrorism and economic risks, need to be evaluated against today’s travel risks.
CYBERSECURITY Travel managers need to protect their company and travellers from active cyberthreats. The first step is to recognise cybersecurity as a daily risk to travel and take responsibility for tackling it, including ensuring that travellers receive proper security training and follow the right precautions when taking a business trip.
A GLOBALISATION RESET Political unrest, changing consumer values, and costs and supply-chain issues are forcing a rethink about globalisation. Companies are shifting from a consolidated to a more diversified approach toward supply, production and consumption, and looking at ways of bringing production back closer to the point of consumption. Business travel patterns may shift as a result.
FINTECH Payment and expense can be time-consuming so adopting fintech-based solutions can help simplify, digitise and automate corporate travel payment, reconciliation and invoice management. l Taken from the report Business Travel Trends for 2022 by BCD Travel
company comes to you and says ‘are you interested in doing our travel’, you know you need a lot of people to service that account. You can rely on technology up to a point, but if the technology goes wrong you are going to need a lot of people and resources to cover all of those travellers.”
Reed and Mackay’s Povey agrees. “There’s the access to technology but also access to expertise,” he says. “We can offer advice to help you make the right decisions, and if you are booking or organising travel for others in your organisation, that would include the design of the policy, control and compliance after that, pre-trip approval, which before Covid was probably around cost and compliance, but post-Covid includes many other considerations.
“Then there’s duty-of-care, management information around the travel, sustainability and CO2 reporting, peer-to-peer benchmarking, where you should be based on the size of the company which is something you won’t know without being able to get to the bigger information – what are your aims in the business: payments, financing, HR, invoicing, access to negotiated content at a reduction in price, and a reduction in contract management.
“Cheaper air fares are often inflexible, and the further ahead you book, the more likely it is you will need to change your plans.”
MEETINGS AND EVENTS
All TMCs say they are seeing an increasing demand for meetings and events, which may seem strange given we are two years in to living with Covid.
Buckley says the ‘distributed workforce’ model of people working from home or in a hybrid manner means that teams need to get together, and yet can’t just walk across the corridor to use a meeting room. In those circumstances, TMCs can help with everything from venue sourcing, identifying the best location and simple things around contracting when there’s a real possibility that something changes. As an example,
Povey says, “For larger meetings, there are potential liabilities, so what caveats do you want in a venue contract if you can’t get 50 per cent of the delegates within a week of the event. Do you have the right to cancel?”
SHOWING THE VALUE
All TMCs have tales of how they have helped clients (and sometimes, not even their own clients) in the past two years. Smith says Simplexity was part of the Focus Travel group – a collective group of agents with one number that was provided to passengers so they could phone when routes were closed down. “A lot of these people didn’t know their options,” he says. “Some travellers had been sitting at airports for two or three days, and we could say, if we take you this way we can get you home.
“Afterwards we got some phone calls and beautiful messages on our Facebook pages saying how much we had helped them. And that’s why we love what we do. We are expert at finding solutions to get people home or get them where they need to go. And even if just one of those people comes back later and says, ‘I remember when you helped me, now I want to book some travel’, it’s all worth it.”
MEETINGS AND EVENTS ADAPT
Companies are looking for new ways to bring together employees, and hotels have been quick to adapt. De Vere recently introduced Smart Base, which provides a selection of properties where those who need a break from homeworking can set up a work space and arrange in-person meetings, events or training sessions, while also exploring a new place and even fitting in tourist activities. Whether the location is chosen because it is equidistant between distributed work teams, or simply is in an area allowing access to the countryside, the service is available across properties. These include De Vere Latimer Estate in Buckinghamshire, De Vere Cotswold Water Park, De Vere Wokefield Estate near Reading, De Vere Tortworth Court near Bristol, De Vere Beaumont Estate in Windsor, and De Vere Horsley Estate in Surrey.
Leveraging technology, a Smart Connections meetings package allows teams to connect together both in person and virtually, with Zoom videocalling to multi-room virtual meetings, so teams can meet in person at the property while interacting with those unable to physically attend. Booking is easy with a live availability booking service for the rooms through an integrated cloud-based meetings and events booking platform on the De Vere website, powered by MeetingPackage. Also, tech-savvy support is available at the hotels. Finally, with safety and security essential to reassure staff, with the help of ChemEco, De Vere has a range of measures including deep cleaning of bedrooms and public areas and regularly sanitising public areas using jet action ‘misting’ technology.
