Keeping Track of Travel

Customizing and automating travel planning and purchasing saves time. “All these tools are to be embraced, because they’ve helped drive up productivity and created new opportunities for cost containment,” says Deborah Callahan, president and CEO of Corporate Travel Solutions/American Express, a St. Paul–based provider of business-travel management and incentive and meeting programs.

Power in the Numbers

Another advantage to centralizing travel activity is that it potentially gives companies the leverage they need to negotiate preferred-supplier agreements with airlines, hotels, and car-rental firms that offer discounted rates companies based on projected volume of transactions. “Single-source purchasing gives you central-data collection, which allows for consolidated buying power,” Callahan explains.

If business travelers are free to book their own travel through various online sources and with the suppliers of their choice, their employers likely are undermining their own ability to harness spending power to secure favorable rates.

“Like many different industries right now, the travel industry is all about volume,” says Carlson Wagonlit’s Buckner. “And we’re a transaction-based business. The more a company has in transactions, sometimes, the better your leverage.”

Give Them Credit

Travelers at Tennant Company are required to make all their travel-related transactions with company credit cards, which are integrated with an automated expense-reimbursement tool, Wahoske says. “The way our process works, when you use the company credit card, it pre-populates the expense report,” he says. “Then, because it’s on line, you can add extra out-of-pocket cash, allocate the expenses, and send it electronically to a manager that will approve it electronically. Then it goes directly to the accounts payable department for payment.”

Corporate travel cards are readily available and generally look and work the same. “There’s not a lot of variation,” says Wahoske, who says that the choice between Visa, MasterCard, American Express, or another provider might depend on how widely accepted each card is in various parts of the world. “We do business in more than 50 countries, so that was a consideration.”