Safe and Sound

In addition to cost savings, safety has become a high priority for travel managers and providers. “Our travelers have to be safe, they have to be comfortable, or they’re not going to be functional,” Vollrath says.

Here again, in-house managers say they rely heavily on their travel-management companies to keep track of their employees’ whereabouts and maintain a watchful eye for security alerts throughout the world. “We have the technology right now to run reports for any city in any country in the world and find out who is there and who is scheduled to go there,” Boche says. On the same day that London’s subway was bombed in July 2005, for example, a group of children from one of Blue Ribbon’s client companies was in the city and scheduled to take the train from downtown London to Gatwick Airport that morning. “We were able to get confirmation that they were not only checked in to the flight, but they were on the plane,” Boche recalls. “So before their parents—our customers—woke up that morning, we already had called them to say, ‘You’re going to hear about this bombing—we want you to know your child is safe.’ In a managed program, those are the kinds of services you’re going to see.” Providing accurate, up-to-the-minute travel information can also ease an employee’s mind while keeping them safe.

In-house travel managers can augment their safety programs with tools that suit their specific needs. For instance, Personnel Decisions sends consultants to work with clients in possibly high-risk areas of the Middle East, Africa, Asia, and South America. If the security risk is deemed high, such as in Saudi Arabia, Krebsbach contracts with local security agencies to provide transportation and protection services for employees from the time they leave the airport until they return for the trip home.

Tennant Company aligns itself with a Web-based tool called International SOS, an emergency-travel-services company. “It allows employees to access a network of multilingual specialists, who can assist them in the event of a medical or security emergency.”

And Plato Learning, Vollrath says, reimburses its travelers, who rely heavily on rental cars, for the basic cost of AAA membership. The firm equips its frequent travelers with company-provided cell phones or BlackBerries. “We’re managing the safety and security of our employees,” Wahoske says. “That aspect of a managed travel program, alone, demonstrates a value to most senior management in companies.” 

How Do You Measure Up? Cost control ranks high in any corporate travel manager’s list of responsibilities. Benchmarking enables travel managers to consistently assess how their travel programs measure up—against like-sized organizations, businesses in their industry or their geographic area, or their own past performance. “Benchmarking tools, to me, are invaluable,” says Gaye Vollrath, manager of travel and finance programs at Plato Learning, Inc., in Bloomington. “They can tell you if you’re getting the control you’re looking for.” Vollrath has used the Managed Travel Index and Bench-marking Tool, which was introduced last year by the National Business Travel Association (NBTA) Foundation, the education and research branch of the National Business Travel Association in Alexandria, Virginia. The Managed Travel Index enables subscribers to input their department data to get a rating of the effectiveness of their travel program, while the benchmarking tool allows travel managers to size up their airfare and hotel expenditures against prices reported by hotels and airlines in select markets. 8220;We were able to see how our travel-management program stacks up against national standards through the NBTA tool,” Vollrath says. “We’ve identified our strengths and areas where we can do better.” Mike Krebsbach, meanwhile, is eager to examine another benchmarking tool, this one from Runzheimer International, in Rochester, Wisconsin. “I’m really excited about that one,” says Krebsbach, vice president of accounting operations and global travel management for Personnel Decisions International in Minneapolis. “I can pull their benchmarking data and match it with my actual expenses. And it’s got dashboarding availability, so I can get the red, yellow, and green flags for areas where I might have issues or problems.” Travel managers also can benchmark against their colleagues’ programs through a variety of business associations, including the NBTA, Meeting Professionals International, the Association of Corporate Travel Executives, and others. Says Marty Wahoske, corporate travel manager for Minneapolis-based Tennant Company: “Those types of associations afford you opportunities to benchmark with a lot of the good professionals in the business.”