Keeping Track of Travel

Establish the Ground Rules

The foundation of any well-managed travel program is a dedicated in-house travel manager, Wahoske says. That role can be filled by a full- or part-time employee, an administrative assistant, or a full-fledged department, depending on a company’s overall travel expenditures. “That’s a first step,” he says.

The next step is to devise a company-wide travel policy. “It provides direction and sets parameters—boundaries of spend. And then you manage your costs to that travel policy,” Wahoske says. “How do I get approval to take a trip? Who do I call? How do I pay for it? Am I spending the right amount of money? How do I get reimbursed? It has to cover the whole range of issues.”

Fares booked by a travel-management company in 2005 were, on average, $56 less than the same flights booked on line.

Avoid ambiguity, Krebsbach advises. “Be crystal clear. Outline exactly what the expectations are for travelers—what you’re going to cover and what you’re not going to cover.”

Companies that create specific travel policies are better able to influence employees’ travel-planning decisions. According to a 2005 Runzheimer survey on corporate travel policies and budgets, 74 percent of respondents, 51 percent of which spent $10 million or less annually, said they were trying to control travel costs by tightening adherence to travel policies.

And for any policy to be successful, it must be visible and accessible to all employees. Many companies post their policies on a dedicated intranet site. “We have a travel portal site—it’s an end-to-end communication tool that communicates to everyone the different elements of our travel program,” Wahoske says.

Team With a Travel-Management Company

By funneling all travel through a single source, companies are better able to monitor compliance and control costs. Travel-management companies can manage all or part of their client’s travel needs: booking tickets and monitoring costs while adhering to client policies. “A company has to look closely at what their time is worth and what they want their people to focus their energy on,” says Arnt Pederson, CEO of Accent Travel International, a travel-management company in Bloomington. “It’s a logical thing to outsource.”

Gaye Vollrath, manager of travel and finance programs for Bloomington-based educational software firm Plato Learning, Inc., agrees. Vollrath oversees the travel activity of about 500 travelers, including a highly decentralized national sales force. “Especially for a company that has a single person doing travel—and a lot of us do other things, as well—our travel management company becomes an extension of us,” Vollrath says. “There have been untold advantages to having that agency on our side.”

Plato travelers are required to book everything—even a one-night hotel stay or a one-day car rental—through a designated travel-management company. By centralizing travel activity, Vollrath explains, Plato is able to get consolidated reports from its vendor regarding who is where in the country, what they are spending on the various aspects of their trip, and if their spending is compatible with travel policies and within national benchmarks. “If you’re not centralized, it’s very hard to get that data,” she says. “Without accurate data, you can’t benchmark. You won’t know how you’re stacking up against national averages, best practices, or your own policies.”