Steve Reynolds is CEO of rate auditing and rebooking platform Tripbam
With corporate travel on hold for many organisations for well over a year now, as a travel manager responsible for managing spend, what should you do? Take a long holiday? Worry about your job? Keep doing what you've done in the past? My guess is many of you have justifiably done some combination of all the above; however, it's time to think differently.
Covid-19, as we know it today, will eventually come to an end and corporate travellers will get back on the road. If you don't believe that, stop reading this article and log on to LinkedIn immediately. Your career in travel is over. If you do believe it, the clock is ticking. You've got six months or less to get your house in order before business travel is predicted to come back in earnest.
Why worry about travel during a travel freeze? Here are three reasons.
• Travel has changed. Your travellers aren't going to the same places. Future volumes are impossible to predict. Future rates and fares are unpredictable. Budgets are lower. All this requires greater flexibility to achieve savings and prove your value to your company. One way to achieve this is to make the move from static rates and deals to dynamic and more real-time negotiations and ongoing programme management. If there's a silver lining to be had from Covid-19, it's that this unwelcome travel freeze has forced us all to rethink how we're going to procure discounts in the future.
• Automation is the answer. Artificial intelligence, machine learning, continuous sourcing, and blockchain. For most of us it's a bunch of technical jargon, but all are being applied to most areas of procurement and across most finance departments. If you put your CFO or CPO hat on, your expectation is for your travel manager to bring solutions into their programme with similar capabilities. Gone are the days of large teams of individuals trying to manually audit expense reports and contracts, reconciling spreadsheets and crunching numbers for earnings reports. Automation has enabled companies to perform the same functions across all transactions, not just a select few. Why not audit every expense report for fraud and every contract for compliance? Why not renegotiate every contract that falls out of bounds to achieve greater savings? The answer lies with automation.
• There's no time like now. Transitioning to this approach doesn't happen overnight. Services must be vetted, references checked, agreements negotiated, funds budgeted, reviews performed and systems implemented, all of which can take anywhere from six months to a year. If you wait until volumes return, you could have a full year of suboptimal performance, resulting in challenging conversations justifying your decision-making until these systems are showing value.
In summary, it's much harder to switch out the engine on the car when it's traveling down the road at 80 miles per hour. It's much easier when it's parked in the garage. Corporate travel volumes are widely predicted to return within the next 12 months. Greater flexibility is required as the future will be even harder to predict than it has been in the past. Implementing technology to scale and transforming the travel procurement process is frankly going to be a requirement, but it does take time.
All this adds up to starting the process now. It's safe to say that every travel manager around the world has been worried about their travel programme over the past year and a half. But now is the time to move from consternation to constructive action, taking advantage of this travel freeze to improve and ready your programme before it's too late.