One way to measure the cost savings is through reporting from the TMC. The collection of data will break down air, car, hotel and credit card spend with Ad Hoc reporting capabilities. However, a non-mandated travel program makes it difficult to ensure cost savings to the organization.
Reporting to Senior Management should reflect true costs associated with your program, unfortunately, as noted, all data may not be captured. It is important for management to realize the benefits of mandating the use of the TMC and preferred vendors to better leverage discounts for the organization.
Some of our greatest savings are obtained by mandating hotel bookings through our program. As an example, we used to capture 50% of bookings through our on-line booking tool or TMC – the other 50% was booked directly with the properties.
When our travelers’ booked directly with the hotels, not only were they not obtaining negotiated rates, or even per diem, our organization lost concrete numbers needed to help leverage future negotiations. We found ourselves scrambling around to match data to assist us each year to negotiate with hotels for per diem.
Recently, management had decided to mandate per diem which has helped us to capture more data and increase adoption of our on-line booking tool. We have seen a significant drop in bookings that are made over per diem because employees would be responsible for the overage or have an Officer sign off on the overage prior to expensing. Our “over per diem” spend dropped approximately $200,000 over the last year just by telling the traveler they would be responsible for any hotel booked over per diem.
All in all, management needs better insight to travel costs to see what exactly is happening within the organization and within the industry and make necessary adjustments to save on travel costs, and the way to do this is with reporting that is captured by your mandated TMC.
By Stefanie Tretola