Travel as an industry is constantly evolving to offer better services. Constant changing, however, brings its own challenges.Jetways Travels focuses its efforts on
guiding corporations through this potential landmine to manage their travel programs safely, minimize travel spend & travel risks, and enhance travel experience.
A well-formulated travel management program ideally enforces the importance of travel policy compliance and more importantly the significance of demand management across the corporation.
Demand management refers to the optimization of business travel plans to include only those trips that are truly essential and unavoidable for a company's bottom-line. It involves avoidance of travel cost through technology, such as net meetings, videoconferencing and webinars to achieve business objectives where possible. Integrating preference for technology-based meetings in a travel policy can highly assist corporations in avoiding non-essential travel costs altogether.
To maximize savings where travel is essential and unavoidable, Jetways Travels advises corporations to encourage travel policy compliances by dedicating efforts to understand traveller behaviour, especially the reasons that induce travellers to book out of policy and reform travel policies accordingly. According to industry research, travel policy compliance in itself can garner a savings of as much as 20 Percent.
While corporations should encourage travellers to comply with all travel policies, special focus should be in the following areas:
Did you know air tickets bought in advance could cost a fraction of the air ticket cost bought on the day of travel?
Encouraging advance ticket bookings, even if it is just 14 days before the travel date can cost you just half of the airfare bought on the day of travel. As the date of travel draws closer, fares increase at a rate of 2 Percent per day on an average.
Did you know restricted fares or fares with restrictions on cancellations, modifications etc are often significantly lower than negotiated fares, even when they are cancelled and reissued? In short-haul flights, they can be as much as 60 Percent lower.
Encourage travellers to book restricted fares when they are lower than negotiated fares. In the corporate world, the chances of cancellations and changes to bookings is less than 10 Percent, so keeping use of restricted fares on preferred airlines as a travel policy can lead to major savings, even while meeting the required volumes.
Did you know, Booking travel through preferred suppliers always ensures that you enjoy volume-based discounts, which offer better returns than booking at a 'best price' outside of preferred booking channels? Preferred suppliers are bound by contract to apply negotiated discounts in return for a specific volume of travel. Encouraging travellers to book through these and contribute to the volume always ensures overall yearly savings of over 3 Percent, especially when compared to stand-alone bookings with non-preferred suppliers. Using preferred suppliers works for both hotels and airlines.
Did you know corporations that increased the minimum flight duration required for approval of business class tickets always recorded higher savings? Encourage travellers to travel on economy especially on short-haul flights. Organizations with the most successful travel management plans limit Business Class travel to flights with flight duration of over 8 hours.
Did you know corporations that enforce mandates for booking through preferred booking channels register more savings as they ensure volume bookings and enjoy lower negotiated rates in return? Even when they booked lower restricted fares, when available, the booking volumes ensured higher overall savings in travel expenditure. Booking outside of preferred channels dilutes volumes. In addition, safety and security of employee travellers is a concern as travel data is not accessible and hence tracking them down in the case of untoward events becomes highly-complex.
