The Blank Slate: Starting—or Starting Over—with Managed Travel

An effective travel policy begins to address such issues. While many small and midsize companies implement travel policy as “guidelines,” Hunke said it was important with her program to go further than that. Policy should set standards upfront: The traveler must use an approved booking tool, for example, or they may have maximum spending amounts for accommodation and that policy gets configured into a booking tool that will throw flags when the traveler books a flight or accommodation that goes beyond those caps.

That said, not all travel experiences have to be equal. If there are levels of travelers who have access to additional services and amenities, it’s best to define in what situations and for whom those amenities kick in, and not leave them to be applied inconsistently. Similarly, different markets may have different needs and, therefore, creating exactly the same policy in both markets may actually create inequities. For example, to mandate an online booking tool in a market where the most convenient travel content cannot be accessed through that tool won’t create an equitable program across the company’s employees. So, yes, implementing a managed travel program can get complex.

Starting from Scratch

At the very top of the spending scale for a midsize travel program, which BTN defines at around $15M in U.S. air spend, Hunke went a traditional route of working with a large travel management company BCD Travel and implementing Concur as the company’s preferred booking tool. The manufacturing company is two years into the process of sourcing preferred suppliers and launching the program, which went live in some locations in April and will continue to roll out.

Not every midsize travel program—a segment that can be very diverse in its requirements—will decide that preferred airline and hotel contracts are accessible for them or that they are best served by a mega-agency. So they go a different direction.  

Eliquent Life Sciences business operations manager Patrice Mistretta is putting together a new travel program for the company that will launch in about six months. Eliquent spends about $2 million annually on travel and has about 400 employees. Mistretta, however, used to manage travel for just 200 employees. Times have changed: Her previous company joined with four others, and she now has the challenge of unifying a travel management program across five separate entities that were pulled together under the Eliquent brand early this year.