Super travel-management: now in Kazan
Travel policy development, business process automation, ways of efficient communication with providers and other basic travel management issus have been discussed at ABT-ACTE Moscow educational sessions a good many time. And many of those who attended these sessions several years ago as audience can now be called industry experts — they have gained not only theoretical knowledge, but also experience, and are ready to share it with their colleagues. This is why last year the Association started a series of regional conferences where business travel and MICE experts from different cities of Russia for the first time ever got an opportunity to get acquainted with the best business travel practices that had proved their efficiency in the capital and abroad. One more event of the series — the conference «Modern travel management. Business trip management. Event organization» was held on April 15th in Kazan. Partners of the event were Russian Railway Tours, Business Way, Tourism Development Center of the Republic of Tatarstan, Kerzner International, Travelport, UTS Group, Kazan hotels Riviera, Relita-Kazan and the Moscow Metropol.
The capital of the Republic of Tatarstan offers great business travel facilities: excellent transport facilities, good communication with other regions of Russia and foreign countries, modern hotels. The greatest changes were made before Kazan`s millennium in 2005 and the Universiade, after which the city inherited 198 accommodation facilities. They include 2 five star hotels — Korston Royal and Mirage Hotel Kazan, and 19 four star hotels. One of these hotels in the historic centre of the city, Relita—Kazan, hosted experts and guests of ABT-ACTE Russia conference.
As the survey held among event participants by chief editor of BBT Russia Svetlana Denikina showed, Kazan`s travel market was almost unfamiliar with the profession of a travel manager. To be more exact, in many companies there are employees whose job responsibilities include business trip and corporate event arrangement, but for the most part they are secretaries or the staff of marketing or HR departments. This situation is typical of regions where, unlike the travel market of the capital, the trend of including the travel department into such strategic divisions as the finance or the procurement department has not become evident yet. The expert cited data of The Yearbook-2015, according to which about 12% of travel managers in Moscow and St. Petersburg who participated in the survey worked in procurement departments. The vast majority of respondents (61%) were the staff of the administrative department, another 7% report to CEOs of the company directly, a little less (5% and 2% correspondingly) refer to the HR department and the marketing and advertisement departments. Ms Denikina also noted that a travel department as a separate structure was already present in 59% of companies that participated in The Yearbook-2015 survey.
In her speech «A super travel manager: more than tree in one» the speaker dwelled on the main tasks business travel experts usually have to deal with. The first of them, the financial task, consist in efficient resource management that is impossible without a good and strictly controlled travel policy — according to ABT-ACTE Russia research, 92% of companies have this document at the moment. According to The Yearbook, the main priorities of the travel policy in 2015 will be determination of flight/accommodation classes and their limits (it is important for absolutely all travel managers), safety of the staff during the business trip (29% of respondents), travel budget saving (23%), as well as the choice of the main providers and agreement on special rates (20% and 15% correspondingly). Ms Denikina stressed, that the survey was held before the peak of the economic and exchange rate crisis, so BBT Russia and the Association held another research in March 2015 in order to determine new tasks for business trip and MICE organizers. And priorities have changed, indeed. Thus, 39% of travel managers plan to actively introduce technologies into business processes — first of all, self booking tools. Another 24% of respondents said they were thinking about using modern payment solutions (corporate cards and centralized accounts) in the conditions of the budget cut and were going to better control travel policy compliance.
Participants of ABT-ACTE Russia conference in Kazan also spoke about the situations, when it was necessary to develop a travel policy. In expert opinion, a document like that is necessary if there are more than 30 business trips per month in the company, if a holding has regional branches and also in case employees have clearly defined mission statements and they have different statuses when they book TMC services. If a company has set itself the task to optimize business processes and/or to save budget, it will hardly do without explicit regulations on business trips.
Svetlana Denikina noted that the most important part of the resource management process was cooperation with providers that included preparation and execution of a tender to choose a TMC, further cooperation with an agency and conclusion of direct agreements with airline and hotel operators and control of agreement execution. And as the most part of the travel budget (about 52%) in most companies falls on airline tickets, conference experts advised their colleagues paid special attention to communication with air carriers.
Tatiana Geraskina, account manager in UTS, spoke on this subject in more detail. According to UTS data, any company’s expenses on air travel include not only the cost of air transport services themselves (they account for 75-85% of costs), but also penalties of airlines (8-20%), as well as agency fees (2-7%). In order to achieve considerable economy of this part of the budget, the expert advised to make a list of key air carriers, to work out penalty and ticket refund policy in case of business trip cancellation, to set time limits, to participate in frequent flyer programs, to use SBTs and to keep analytical records. Conference participants also agreed that a very simple requirement — early air ticket booking — was a good way to cut air travel costs.
Ms Geraskina also spoke about some aspects of 3D agreement with airlines. She drew everyone’s attention to the fact that air carriers were usually ready to offer corporate buyers a 3-7% discount off their published rate — of course, on condition of a certain guarantee purchase volume. The discount will not probably apply to the cheapest ticket rate and will be valid for certain destinations only. Special rates are also unlikely to be included into these preferential terms.
During the conference Moscow experts shared with their Kazan fellow colleagues not only theoretical knowledge in travel management, but also their achievements — in particular, results in travel budget optimization they had achieved. Thus, Julia Evlakhova from BNS Group said they had managed to cut business trip costs by 43% within the previous several months, but the number of business trips did not decrease. According to the expert, company management set a clear task for the travel department: to analyze literally every provision of the travel policy and to find ways to save budget. As it was impossible to decrease accommodation and air travel limits in view of the rate rise, it was decided to focus on the stage of business trip arrangement. «After we examined our statistics we realized that 80% of business trips in our company were scheduled», Ms Evlakhova explains. «So they could be arranged as much as a month in advance, and in this case we get a wide choice of hotels within our accommodation limit, as well as purchase airline tickets with the lowest rate».
The expert also recommended her colleagues to use non-refundable rates — exception can be made for business trips of chief executives, because adjournment or total cancellation of their business trips is quite frequent. You can also cut air travel costs by using business travel allowance: the first flight under it will be firmly-booked (for example, Moscow — Samara), but you are free to choose all the following destinations. As for the cost of transfer to the airport and back, BNS Group decided to stop using taxi during working hours — employees are recommended to get to the airports by Aeroexpress.
Participants of Kazan conference discussed other strategic tasks of travel management as well — in particular, business process automation. In the opinion of BBT Russia chief editor, the need for introduction of efficient technologies, first of all, in booking, is caused not only by business trip cost optimization, but also by the change of generations in the labour market. The so called «millennials» expect their company to provide them with free access to all the traditional resources and sources of information, as well as flexibility in the process of service booking. When they plan their business trip, they want to use the same technologies they are used to in their daily life. The Y generation is used to communicating with each other and the rest of the world in the language of technology, so any travel manager’s task is to learn to speak the same language as they do.
The speaker cited The Yearbook-2015 data, according to which 52,7% of corporate buyers were already using online booking tools, but their adoption rate was still extremely low. Thus, only 9% of companies accomplished more than 80% of their transactions through this tool, while more than a half of organizations made only about 10% of bookings with the help of OBT.
Leroy Merlin is one of advanced users of a corporate online booking platform, its administrative manager Aleksandra Perekalskaya shared her experience with the participants of the conference. The expert said they managed to optimize two very important indices at a time by introducing OBT — the time the employee spends on business trip arrangement and the cost of the business trip itself. This, it took business travellers not less than 10 minutes to fill in standard forms when they worked offline. It took them another 30 minutes to find an appropriate accommodation option and to request for it, and the average order processing time equalled one day. Nowadays, according to the expert’s data, the average time of online work is not more than 14 minutes. As for the average transaction cost, after they switched to OBT, this figure decreased for the first time for many years. If from 2009 till 2012 it grew from 5500 to 9100 roubles, in 2014 it amounted to 6700 roubles — the cost of airline tickets alone dropped by 16%!
Efficiency of modern tools of business trip arrangement and management was proved by Valeria Zakharova, sales manager of Travelport. The speaker stressed that the business travel market of Eastern Europe in general and Russia in particular was very attractive for global technology providers. Economy growth rate in this region in 2015 is expected to be twice as much as that of Western Europe. As for business travel market volume, it is expected to amount to $54 bln. by 2016 — and it is almost twofold growth since 2012.
The expert noted that business trip management tool offered by Travelport, Trip Gate, offers not only quick and easy booking and ticketing, but also control and transparency. The whole process starting from business trip planning till the provision of the result to the customer includes not more than 5 steps: 1) quick choice of the date, time and other key parameters of a business trip; 2) booking confirmation; 3) approval of the business trip by the responsible manager; 4) inclusion of the booking into the ticketing queue; 5) handing over the ticket and the air travel card by the TMC to the customer.
The new hotel booking portal Hotelbookpro was presented to travel experts at the conference in Kazan, head of customer department Tatiana Moschagina acquainted event participants with it. At present the system includes about 450 thousand hotels in 235 countries — reservation process takes not more than 20 minutes, and in case of order rejection other accommodation options are offered. Customer support is available in 24/7 mode in Russian and English.
Experts of ABT-ACTE conference drew everyone`s attention to the fact that business processes should be automated not only by the customer, but by the agency as well. Natalia Poroshina noted that a significant part of agency’s time was spent not on choosing a destination or immediate booking, but on documentation processing. Thus, difficulties in data acquisition, storage and procession can be caused by hand fill of information into the agency’s system. It leads not only to errors in financial documents, but also to the increase in the amount of time needed and the necessity to attract extra human resources — to the accounting department, booking department or the report group. Most of these problems can be solved with the help of Platon, a platform developed by ZCTS experts. It is a complex system of automated accounting for travel companies, as well as airline and railway booking offices on the basis of 1C «Trade management» 8.2. The project has been successful in the market for 15 years already and is used by many leading industry participants as a back office for their online products for corporate buyers and individual customers. The system enables report preparation with one single button, card processing within the accounting system, monetary funds management in different currencies, control of customer accounts receivable and a lot of other options.
Conference participants also paid due attention to corporate event arrangement. Victoria Nikolaeva, communications manager in Reynaers Aluminium Rus, reminded the guests of the fact that any corporate event was in the first place a way to promote the company`s image, a platform for communication and a way to analyze the customer`s needs. So even during the crisis you should not abandon this efficient marketing instrument. But budget saving is the direct responsibility of event organizers.
The expert warned conference participants against risks even the most experienced event managers can come across. Thus, in order to avoid confusion in the airport, it is recommended to check everyone`s tickets — unfortunately, mistakes in them are quite frequent. And if you do not want anyone to forget about the flight at all, do your best to remind them about the trip: «Information is never too much», Ms Nikolaeva explained.
If the event was arranged exactly in due time and it met the budget, all the goals were achieved, both guests and company executives were satisfied, and even the most introspective guest thanked you — the event may be considered to be a success.
By the way, the trip to Kazan was just as successful and memorable for Moscow experts — apart from participation in the business part they had an opportunity to get acquainted with culture and history of the city and its suburbs. The excursion of the Kazan Kremlin and the Island of Sviyazhsk was organized by the Tourism Development Center of the Republic of Tatarstan and Business Way Company. On the night before the conference the guests had a cocktail in one of the best hotels of the city — Kazan Riviera. The experts got acquainted with MICE facilities of the hotel that offers Hermitage congress hall with the area of 1770 sq. meters and the capacity of 900 persons, and four conference halls with capacities from 48 to 300 persons.
After the conference there was also a surprise for participants from Kazan: at the end of the educational session prizes provided by ABT-ACTE Russia were raffled off: they included a voucher for a breakfast for two in the Metropol, a voucher for accommodation in Swissotel Krasnye Holmy and two economy tickets to any European destination from Finnair.
ABT-ACTE Russia conference lasted the whole day, and discussions did not stop not only in the hall, but also on the sidelines. «The participants` vivid reaction to the topics discussed means they were very important for regional experts as well. I am sure we will come back to Kazan in order to discuss some more specific travel management tasks in more detail — for example, corporate online tools or payment solutions. And now Association experts are going to Tyumen and Novosibirsk — meet us at the next educational sessions on May 26 and 28!» executive director of ABT-ACTE Russia Ekaterina Aleksandrova ended the conference.