Thank you to everyone who joined us today for AmTrav's April 2025 webinar on stretching your travel dollars, navigating economic uncertainty. Thank you in particular to Grant Caplan, President at Procurigence, for sharing his time and expertise with our audience. Thank you Grant!
The webinar recording is here for you, slides are here, transcript down below.
We didn't have time for Part III, the how-to demonstration in AmTrav, so that's here for you:
Actionable steps we discussed:
- Understand past downturns. Economic downturns are slow-moving beasts.
- Prioritize revenue-generating and business-critical travel, use data & policy to enforce this.
- Use your unused tickets, unused tickets are good for free travel.
- Use travel policy and pre-trip approvals to achieve your organization's goals.
- Use your data to understand what's going on, keep tabs on and inform your decisions.
- Communicate! Plan ahead, work with your leadership to explain the why and the what.
- Supplier savings opportunities will come.
Resources:
AmTrav Knowledge Base article on unused ticket name changes.
AmTrav Knowledge Base article on United's unused ticket refund offer.
Webinar transcript:
Elliott McNamee: My name is Elliott McNamee, I’m with AmTrav, thank you for joining our webinar today. We are talking about stretching your travel dollar today. Again, I'm Elliott. I work at AmTrav. It is my pleasure to be joined today by Grant Caplan. Grant is one of my favorite people to work with because he's got that combination of understanding the big picture, the strategy, using his experience to inform that. And then you can go down into the details and understand what happens with ticketing and how airline programs work and all kinds of stuff like that. It makes him really sharp and really valuable to me as somebody who knows him professionally and to his clients. So thank you, Grant. Can you introduce yourself and Procurigence besides my own friendly words?
Grant Caplan: Absolutely. And I appreciate the friendly words. My background comes from managing the GSA from the House of Representatives and all their spend and finally got to learn the travel agency environment by being involved in a regional one of those and then moved on to technology and seeing how the technology really can enable an outcome that's strategic for a company that wants to control its spend, increase its service, and so on. So I got into consulting at a given moment and am able to consult with corporations, which we do globally for companies headquartered all around the world that need to find a new travel agency, pick out their technology. Basically procure, right? They have to procure travel services and so Procurigence is procurement and intelligence. And we like to think that's how it goes most days working with our best colleagues. Yeah, it comes out to be some great intelligence for the company that's brought us on to work. And it's nice to be here Elliott, thanks for having me.
Elliott: Thanks, Grant. We are excited. We like bringing expert outside perspectives to our customers and folks who join us. So today's webinar, we are going to, I'm sorry, I'm getting ahead of myself. Today's webinar, the idea behind this is that you need flexibility to do your job, set the controls that you need to achieve your organization's goals. If the goals are expanding the company rapidly, you need the tools for that. If the goals are conserving cash, you need that too. So our job is to help you do your job. Grant said something just now, which is that our job is to be enablers. To enable you to do your job. There is some tension as AmTrav has said in the past, we're pretty open about this. We make money when you travel. So we like it when you travel. We believe in the ROI of travel. But we also know that your job sometimes is to manage the travel program closely. And we are here for that. We want to help you do your job. You'll stick with us in the good times if we're there for you in the lesser times. So today's webinar is about this balance between going places and seeing people and making business happen, learning things. And on the other hand, sometimes you have to conserve cash, to protect the company's bottom line.
Elliott: The slide I was thinking of before. Three parts here. Number one is context from the past. That's part one of this webinar. We're going to look at some data. If you like data, you're in the right place. If you don't, bear with us. Part two is, but I think that context is important. Grant brings a lot of experience, just a few years, seeing as he's only 29 years old. Yes. But many of us haven't seen this movie before. And so we want to check out what this movie could look like. Part two, actionable steps to control travel spending. And then part three is optional, how to save and set controls in A to B. We'll see what a2b's technology can do. You are here for expert advice to control travel spending. You will not get predictions. We are not going to tell you what's going to happen in the economy because we don't know. No politics. We have a no politics policy. We serve folks of all persuasions and it's not really our business. And we are not here for selling. I really appreciated that somebody said, I am willing to listen and hope this webinar is not to sell business. I really appreciated that question up front. It was a good reminder. And this is why we are here. So thank you to that person. Yes. Let's look at some context. Yes.
Elliott: First up, I want to make the point that most economic slowdowns actually move kind of slowly. We live in a world where things happen very quickly. Whether it's news getting out. News getting out. Fast response, fast gratification. Amazon can deliver things to you later today. Slowdowns actually move pretty slowly. And to zoom in on that. This is the number of months after the slowdown starts. And if you go back to 1990 and 2001 and even 2007, unemployment went up for a while. It wasn't a one month thing the way that COVID is. I had to cut off the chart because COVID unemployment went up to 14%. But that's pretty abnormal. I don't think we would be looking at another one of those. In fact, it moves kind of slowly. So what does this mean for business travel? I want to invite Grant here in just a second to think about past experience business travel during slowdowns. So we saw the 2001 recession. Business travel dropped by about 11%. 2009, obviously that was a pretty long period from 2007 to 2010. The Great Recession, but business travel dropped about 8% in the biggest year about 8%. Then COVID, which again, we don't think that's really the context that's relevant here, but business travel dropped pretty fast there. So in general, business travel does drop but 10%, not the 50% that we are. That we saw in COVID. Anything you'd add thinking about the overall business travel environment during a slowdown?
Grant: Well, I'm happy to say that the last couple slowdowns were a little bit different as us helping corporations manage their travel. And one of the things we do for small corporations is we are actually the travel manager for them if they don't have somebody in house. So we have to deal with these slowdowns ourselves and actually make the plan with the company. The last couple have been a lot better in that companies are getting a little smarter about business travel in that they are really seeing the value of it where in 2001, when things got scary, and this is really about fear, companies just shut off travel. Like a water faucet. Just shut it off. And that wasn't really very wise. And in our strategic evaluation with them, we found that certain types of travel have a different ROI. And Elliott, you properly mentioned that. And if you can look at what type of travel has a better ROI for you. It's a little difficult to figure out what that ROI is, but you can get a sense of it. And then keep that travel supported and going because it's productive. We still have to produce. And as people who manage travel. I imagine everybody joining us today and ourselves included. We have to make sure that travel money is spent more wisely in these downturn times. But it doesn't just dry up. And we are very smart. We've seen that a lot of business travel that was internal after the lockdowns of COVID, kind of went away, but it turned into something else. So it didn't really go away. It turned into internal meetings where we were able to network together and support all of those video calls we've been doing. And being in each other's physical presence instead of over a video helps that happen. The downturns are turning into a little more meaningful travel being sustained instead of being the turning it off.
Elliott: I did. I did. And that's, no, that's exactly the story we want to remember. Okay, so what happens, you know, what else happens. Airfare. We were able, thanks to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, they put out airfare. What we see is, yes, airfare does go down. These are real, I'm sorry. Nominal. So this is not inflation adjusted for a reason. But we did see in 2001 airfare dropped about 5%. 2009, that was a particularly rough period for the airlines. But there again, airfare dropped in, of course, during COVID. So airfare in a slowdown airfare will drop. It's a supply and demand type thing. Supply can't drop as fast as demand drops. Airlines are already making noises about trimming capacity. United's retiring 20 planes earlier on a fleet of a thousand. Delta is trimming its back half this year. But we shall see. So travel gets a little bit cheaper. Also, I added hotel rates. Hotels interestingly don't move quite as much. They don't move as much down or up. Perhaps it's harder to increase or decrease the supply of hotels. I also couldn't go as far back. But there again, we saw softening in hotel prices during the Great Recession and, of course, during COVID. Before it came right back.
Grant: Part of the hotel staying strong is that if people don't fly they drive. And we're seeing more driving within X number of hours since the lockdowns, but even in the other downturns if the hotel rates were down a little bit, maybe I took a personal trip or whatever. So also a change that has taken place since the last downturn in 2009, 2010 is there's a lot more yield management going on at the hotel side than there used to be. So the software has become more complex. The algorithm has gotten more complex, and they can manage their average daily rate better than they could. Cool. And then how are we feeling? We asked this question at registration. BTN has also done this recently. We wouldn't understand how folks are feeling right now. So we asked, do you expect your company to change spending levels in the coming months? 32%, I applaud you, said you don't know. I appreciate that. About 20% said yes, they expect spending to decrease. 30% said maintain. 18 said increasing. As Grant pointed out. It actually means 50% of folks at the moment are expecting travel spend to stay the same or increase. That is similar to what business travel news is showing. These are actually the opposite order. And business travel news did their survey twice. So they did it once in January and February and once in April. They are showing similar optimism. So the news might say one thing, the stock market might say one thing. The boots on the ground, the folks who are looking at travel are not not feeling that same feeling. What's the word we're looking for? Panic. So good to know. In any case, our job is to help you prepare for whatever direction you need to take the vote. So this concludes part one. This is our context, our history lesson. Although that will inform us going forward. Part two. If we want to look at what are the actionable steps that you can take to manage your travel spend.
Elliott: Unused tickets are one of my favorite topics. I'm not really sure why. I just really like them. I think it's the same thing I said about Grant, that you can go from the strategy to the a bit down low. They are the largest savings category for most travel programs at AmTrav. Grant, have you seen that elsewhere or is that an AmTrav thing?
Grant: Any of the visionary travel agencies offer very easy visibility to unused tickets. Oddly, I went from A to B today for one of the events we did with AmTrav. For one of our clients, we brought in AmTrav and there are still some unused tickets there. And now I'm thinking, oh, I better get back to the client and say. Hey, if there's a way to use these tickets, we better do that because to Elliott's point, it's enough money that it's worth talking about. And why would you leave money on the table? And unused tickets are just money ready to use depending on the restriction on the fare and what region you ticketed in. The rules of an Austrian Airlines ticket purchased from Europe origin to Europe or a destination is going to be different than an Alaska Airlines ticket purchased from USA origin to USA destination. So you have to just know what's going on. That's part of why the travel agency is important to ask those questions and figure out, well, it looks like we can use it, but how much can we really use? And unused tickets also help people's divisional budgets stay more productive so that they don't unnecessarily waste money off of their divisional budget. And if their divisional budget is cut for travel at a time of a slowdown, then they have these hanging out and they've already been booked as a cost to that division. So it's a way to make some use of travel. Sometimes one division will allow another division to use their tickets, even if they book the expense.
Elliott: Well, and so that feeds right into what is on this slide, Grant. Which is when we looked at 2024, these are well, not the greatest chart. Anyways. For all 2024, travel programs funded 18 days of airfare with their unused tickets. So 18 days doesn't sound a lot, but 6% of airfare was funded with unused tickets. Is that pure savings or maybe just efficiency? We can debate that. But it's a lot of value. And as we look now. Currently, AmTrav accounts are sitting on enough unused tickets to fund 10 days of airfare. So that's looking at the monthly travel spend divided by the current unused balance. That is, as Grant says. If you need to shuffle priorities, some people need to cancel their trip. Others must take a trip that is an opportunity. That's the context. Right.
Grant: When travelers or VPs call me for companies or I'm the travel manager and they say, hey, Grant. Do you know a way we can do this trip for less money? I immediately look at my unused tickets and say, hey, this person's no longer with the company, but we've got $800 on Delta. Here's your ticket. You don't have to book an expense.
Elliott: Yep. We are going to get to something right there in just a second. So how to save unused tickets. And again, if you stick around for part three, we'll look at this in AmTrav. Number one, check your unused ticket balance. That's what Grant was talking about earlier. Go check your unused ticket balance, whether you have access to it yourself or you need to check with your travel management company that is where you start. This is where you can find out. You can go look at last year's airfare spend or first quarter airfare spend and compare that to your unused ticket balance. And that'll tell you how much travel you can fund with your unused tickets. Plus, change fees are gone. Covid killed change fees. It's great. So you don't have to book a bunch of costs. $200, $300 per change with that. Number one, check your unused ticket balance. Start there. Number two, assess those unused tickets. And that's what Grant was talking about. In AmTrav, for example, we'll tell you if the person has an active or inactive profile. If they're inactive, they're probably not traveling for you again. And that's the ticket we want to know. Can we move it to somebody else? Can we get a refund? What are our options there? Critical. And there's a question in the question in the chat, it looks like. Yes, we are open for questions and Q&A. Go ahead, Grant. Do you want to take this? So it says somebody has missed, well, I won't give a name just to keep your identity uh Yeah, okay. Nice. Is Paula. We like first names. My Southwest Assist plan will allow me to get refunds on some of my unused tickets. Is there a way to have that reflected in AmTrav, I assume in A to B? And that's what Elliott should answer.
Elliott: Yes, it is something we can help with. It is not and when we help you out with the refund with Southwest, the ticket will show up as refunded there. It is not a flag that we currently have. You could build something like that. We don't have it in the unused ticket report. During COVID, when unused ticket expirations were extended, we updated, we had a table and we would show the accurate updated expiration date. But we don't have anything for corporate programs like that. It's something that you and your relationship manager can work on. And you're previewing that step forward. Right here. So again, Q&A is open. We like questions. As is the chat. Either way, you're welcome, Paula. It's good to see you. So assess those tickets, look for those opportunities. Number three, remind your travelers. Is this something that you can do with an automated solution through your platform, something that AmTrav offers. We'll take a look at that. Or shoot. To Grant's point, you have an $800 unused ticket. Reach out to that person that's $800 in free travel that could be used for them, that could be used for somebody else, depending on your options. Yeah, please. Excellent.
Grant: All right, so the way I do this when I'm managing a program is firstly, if it's a small enough company, every reservation comes across my desktop. And I can catch it before the void window is closed and say, oh goodness, you booked, I used earlier the example of a Delta ticket. For $1,000, we've got $800 left to use on Delta, then I either call the travel agency and say. Hey, listen, we need to reuse this ticket. Or if I'm not sure if the person wants to reuse something, whether it's theirs or somebody else's. I called the traveler and I said, " Nice that you booked this, but I just sent out a note this morning. Another thing you can do is you can send out a note to your frequent travelers and say, hey, I understand we're being more conservative on travel. Spend, I've got tickets on a number of tickets or airline or you can give a little bit of information that's not too much And say, next couple of times you book, make sure you put a note to the agent to reuse an unused ticket or send it to me as a travel manager or whatever. Yeah. And let them know that you're watching this and you're on their side and you're helping them save money.
Elliott: Something else we need to do is AmTrav, and I'm on my boss about this. I don't think he's watching. Hey, Jeff. Is making it clearer when you or your team are redeeming unused tickets so that you can take credit for that. You ever had an annual review, we want you to be able to say, hey, look at what I saved. So coming. I'm promising you. Would you repeat? Sorry, Elliott, will you repeat the calculation of the number of days funded by the unused tickets? I see that from Cedric. I'm going to show that in part three. We can go over that quickly. It is just the I mean, it's just your unused ticket value divided by your annual air spend, basically. So if you have $100,000 in unused tickets and you spend a million dollars on airfare, that's 10%. 10% of 365 days is 36 days. Oh. Cool. And Shannon says – I appreciate this, Shannon – that you contact active employees and travelers to see if they want to give up their tickets if they're not traveling before the expiration date. Exactly. That sort of proactive you know is that sort of proactive check goes right to the bottom line. And if you're trying to stretch the travel budget, stretch travel dollars, which is where that hokey webinar title came from That's one way to do it.
Elliott: So on that fourth point with refund and name change options, I need to update the AmTrav knowledge base article that contains these, but I'll give you a quick update here. Alaska has a nice generous $125 flat for name changes. The fee is waived at the original lawyer is gold or above. But if you get an Alaska ticket, you can transfer it from one traveler to another. No questions asked for $125. American, if you are an advantage business member with a bean or cart You can do name changes. That's one of the benefits for free of Advantage Business. Delta corporate contact contracted accounts get name changes for $100 and maybe others too. I don't actually know all these rules in detail. Check with your AmTrav relationship manager, your TMC account manager to see what they know. Delta also announced some new options coming for corporate contracted accounts. I think are UATP. But I didn't attend their webinar, so I can't tell you, for example, for sure. Jetblue, name changes are free. Southwest, want to get away plus any time in business select. You can do name changes Refunds are also available on any time in business. Select, as Paula mentioned, corporate programs have access and reach out to your AmTrav relationship manager about Southwest refunds too. We'll talk to you. United has a refund option. Currently, it is set to expire on June 30th, but they have been extending this for four three or four years. So that might still happen. But you can refund an unused ticket for uh Net of $125 cancel fee, it goes up for international and premium But it's still pretty good offer. Again, that's through June 30th. They charge $100 name change for corporate contracted accounts. And so, of course, it might be a little different if you have the small business account which is like advantage business versus an MCA at Delta, which is really a more discounted fare contract than a sky bonus. So sky bonus may not allow for it where an MCA does. I'm not quite sure. Yeah. Devils in the details. These are the high level as Grant points like and there are exceptions. There are exceptions I know of. There are exceptions I don't know about. But that's where, as Grant says, your travel agency, your TMC that's where they should show their value.
Elliott: So that's unused tickets. Number two, travel policy. Right. I want to talk about two flavors of travel policy. Um and then Graham has thoughts on travel policy and I'm looking forward to hearing them. One flavor is dynamic limits. So these are the least logical. Rates and fares that go in and say, look, I know you like this airline But you know. The other leaves five minutes early and is $400 cheaper. You need to be a good steward of the company's money, particularly now. So that's an option. Lowest logic is something that should be built right into your tool. You can set it, adjust it. GSA per diems is another one where it goes through the GSA has said, what are the different rate limits on hotels around the country. And so that's a pretty smart way to understand that Chicago is expensive in the summer but cheap in the winter. So that you can get more dynamic than just a flat $200 or $300 nightly rate. My favorite is Nantucket , which goes from 100 or 150 in Nantucket. It's a hoity-toity island off Cape Cod in Massachusetts. And it's like $500 in the summer or something. Itinerary based cabin restrictions, so length of haul allowing folks to sit in different cabins based on how far they're flying is another dynamic limit. And then varying policy by department level. Not exactly dynamic, but it's something you can do so that, you know, if some departments where you need to pull back on travel. But other departments we need to enable, say operations folks who travel and get paid for service or sales folks who are going to close deals, those higher ROI travel categories we can vary policy based on department. We also have hard limits. So set fare and rate caps. $200, $500 for airfare. Cabin and class restrictions. And of course, advanced purchase is another one. We'll get to pre-trip approvals in just a second. Grant, how do you see how you see these changing as travel conditions change, as economic conditions change? How do you see the use of opportunities?
Grant: When we advise corporations or when we are the travel manager for a corporation, we are talking about what kind of travel policy we should have today. And we want them to be open to changing that policy. The traveler is required to use the most current version of that policy, which can be found on the company's internal website. And they can check it any day. We don't want to change it too often. Because that's too confusing. But one of the things that's not here that I like to do with some companies and the online booking tools, most of them are not good at this, but people just need to use their judgment to have purpose-based travel definitions. It goes a little bit like varying policy by department and level But what it would look like differently is a trip for a training conference is going to have a different policy than a lawyer's trip to defend the company in a lawsuit that was just raised yesterday. Those are two different purposes that call for two different allowable expenses and allowable expenses in downturn times to save money on travel but not shut off travel. That purpose-based policy is a great way to save some more money, be wiser with the money you are spending and so on. And this easily can go into your travel agency so that when you're doing a live call with the travel agent. They can see this and judge it better. Where online cannot. So it's a bit of a conflict. Also setting fare and rate caps can go along with that. So an example would be for a legal trip, there's no fair and rate cap. But for a conference. There is a fair and rate cap and no conference is worth spending $1,200 US in airfare. Whereas a legal trip, that might be acceptable because it represents a lot more money. That ROI word that Elliott was using on the trip. So I think that's travel policy has to be reexamined when you are trying to limit travel and make it more realistic But still assure that you're taking care of people who do travel because their wellness need does not change based on Downturn or upturn in downturn your company business so that distance-based long haul gets this, short haul gets this. Extra leg room is a great way to avoid putting money into medium whole business extra leg room and economy, premium economy best value in the plane in my opinion. Especially on a daytime flight. So splitting your policy is another way for long haul on a night flight, you do business class but you return on the day flight, Europe is the best example. In premium economy because you're not going to have as long of a sleep. And then from the east coast of the US, to the west coast of Europe, maybe not worth getting business class because you can only sleep for two and a half hours of the six or seven hour flight. And so on. So reevaluation is really key.
Elliott: It all depends on how you organize your flight. You have to skip the meal service. Going east and don't drink. Oh, yeah, totally. Because their food isn't any good anyway. Eat in the lounge. Is that the advice that folks came for? All right. How do we do this? How do we make this happen? First, check your policies today. Reasonable first step. Two, review with leadership, right? This is not something that you're going to do in a vacuum. This is something that many people, as Grant said, affects their wellness. Check with them. So you know your options. Now you can go to them and talk to them. I'll tell you, I would really like to do a research project. Calculate loss savings and compare loss savings based on applicable policies. I think there's something there and I'll let you know. Once I have that, I don't have it. So we can't quantify this. But you do have these options. Three, make travel policy adjustments. Hopefully it's something that's easy to do. And if you do this, you may want to let your travel management company know as well in case they don't use the same policy online that they do offline or if you need their help adjusting policy, we'll look at how to do this in MTRA. And then communicate that policy change to key users. That is important. Don't let folks find out that the policy is changing the first time or rather. Don't let them say that the first time that they, well, don't let them accurately say that the first time they heard about this was when they went into the tool. Ideally, you let them know. And maybe they read the email and maybe they don't read the email. But giving that reasoning out also perhaps using an in-app notification to let folks know that, hey, the travel policy has changed due to economic conditions or company conditions. That is… that is key and will smooth over the policy change as it changes. A great place to put that. Flash page of the booking tool the first thing they see and do what it takes to get their attention. Put it in red, make it flash, whatever. And your online booking tool will be your best friend. But also any official communication coming from leadership about that is really important because people do what leaders say. Yeah. And the fact that you're on this webinar, the fact that you're thinking about this now means that you'll be ahead of it when this conversation does come up. It can be faster to move. I always think it would be nice to say you know that if the CFO said, it's 2001 all over again, shut down the travel program, you know, it would be nice to, with a few clicks, get it done. And then you email them back and say it's dumb. That's pretty cool. And that's the same sort of proactive and being ready to go that we would hope that you're able to do. Should it be warranted without shutting down the travel counter? Preterm rules, additional control of pre-trip approvals. We're going to come back to what you said about purpose-based policy, Grant, because I think that there are ways that a savvy administrator can do it without that. I like it. I just don't think we're going to build it. Additional control of pre-trip approval. So you can have booking held for approval after booking. It's an additional layer of oversight for you. Your leadership or your department leaders. You can decide who the approver, who the reviewer and approver is. You can even get notification even if you don't have approval. You can say I want to approve all bookings Or just add a policy. You can, of course, vary the policy by department. So that's where maybe the lower training staff, but maybe the training staff gets a different policy than the lawyers or the marketers. Let's pick on the marketers. The marketers get a stingy policy that requires approval and the lawyers get the go ahead. Travel policy. And then your travelers are usually adults – you know, this is a point I like to make. Your travelers are adults. They're generally going to make responsible decisions. But it allows more oversight and more review. Yeah.
Grant: So how to save with pre-trip approvals? First, review your current approval setup. Pretty basic, same as travel policy. What are you doing today? Number two, discuss with your leadership. Is that an option you want to look at? Is that not an option you want to look at? If you're going to do it, how are you going to do it? And again, how are you going to do it? You could say the department leaders are going to be responsible for reviewing. It's their budget right they should review or you're going to be the reviewer You're just going to have some bookings to look at. Is it going to be all bookings? Is it going to be out of policy? But this is a way to get that additional oversight and control. Three, you go ahead and set up those approvals, whether it is something you can do yourself or reach out to your travel agency. And then again, communicate this to those key users, the bookers who are booking most often, the key travelers. Put in that splash notification that Grant talked about. One other thing that's important: Check on how your travel tool handles pre-travel approvals, pre-trip approvals. Some say this is your trip, but they don't actually book anything. Others will come and actually book. And if we get into the details, they're holding the fair. So long as the fair doesn't expire. The price probably won't change. So that's an important detail and you want to know that because that can cause problems once you are approving, you approve something and it's like, wait, the price has gone up by a thousand dollars. So you approved it, but now the price has changed. You say, well, that's not worth it anymore. And you want to deny it. If the booking is actually held, you shouldn't run into that assuming you're not going through the seven day or 14 day As an approver myself, I prefer to allow it to ticket and then catch it within the void window just for what you said. I don't want to lose fear. Yeah. And I assume in many cases the travel agency's software will catch if there's a lower fare at the moment of ticketing even than what the traveler booked. So I'd rather lock in a rate for 24 hours for the void period. Yep, that's right. So you can get notifications on bookings or you can have those notifications sent to leadership. All of that is configurable. These are options that are available to you.
Elliott: Finally, data. You can't manage what you don't measure. Set up notifications on booking sets we're talking about. That way you'll find out what's happening. The notification volume will depend on the travel volume. Monitor bookings and spending. Hopefully you have the ability to go in and see what's going on. You could go down to what happened yesterday, what was booked yesterday. What was booked last week? Are things going? Is spending going up? Is spending going down? Not only that, of course, you can share that data. Benchmark your savings. I'm going to provide some numbers on savings in a little bit. That is something you can do if you've got something like primary analytics, it'll do it for you automatically. And again, share this insight. With your team so that they can understand what's being spent. Data. Gotta have data. If you don't have data it's difficult to manage travel. So what can you measure? Well, we've got a whole list. You could look at spending by department. Grant's going to have ideas too. You can look at spin by department using your employee IDs that are set to say that Grant in sales and Elliott in marketing and Kyle's in account management. Spent by job level. So there again, you can have folks' job level and you could see, you know, are the senior leaders still traveling? Are we paying for the interns to travel? Is that what we want to do, the analysts? Purpose. So it's a billing field. That is kind of a way that you can keep an eye on the purpose of the trip. So that's something you can configure today and keep an eye on? Maybe it's a directive that you give that, hey, you know, lower value convention travel should go down and you can keep an eye on that with that data. Policy compliance is something that's tracked. Who is approving what travel if you're using approvals, your travel savings, your unused ticket savings, and again that in Amtrad is something we've got to have and I'm aiming to do that this summer. As we do an update to our data. Advanced look at leakage. So what travel is going outside the tool so you're not getting visibility into it ? That's expensive data. Compared to your travel data. That benchmarking we talked about, what if analysis is something else that prime members can do. Oops, I left that in there. Grant, what else would you watch? What else would you make a point of monitoring and measuring?
Grant: When I think of your third bullet. Spend by trip purpose billing fields. I focus more on billing fields being cost center. Is that what you're thinking? Okay. So a purpose would be, this is a training, right? And so employee id is something that trout is something that's assigned to me And billing field is something that I get to go in and say. And so I'm going to a convention or I'm going to an internal meeting or I'm going to a sales presentation. Is a billing. Okay. So yeah, if it were a cost center, I don't see that really giving me the story. The numbers should tell the story. I really want to have in that billing field, a new dropdown that I may not have already saying these are the different reasons For travel, you must pick one of these about your trip that you're trying to book. Before you can continue. It would be a mandatory field. So if it's not in there, it's a custom field for some tools. And it's a built-in field for other tools. I'm not sure how every Every tool handles it, but I've seen it attacked in different ways. That's really important.
Grant: I also like to look at spending by provider and see if certain providers are trending a certain way. So I know that I need to go get a discount with them because I'm spending more money with them. Maybe my average fare for a certain city pair is lower on this carrier than on that carrier that carries the same city pair. Chicago to New York. United american delta And probably others are flying it. And if I'm finding that, we're trending up on a given provider. American. Oh, I'm going to go to my travel agency, get a little bit of data on what I bought, go to my expense system and get a little bit of data. What was it really expense because what is bought is different than what is expensed and see if I need to start having some new supplier level discussions about new discounts or re Refocusing existing discount agreements because now instead of business class, we're using more premium economy Well, I'm going to spend more money with you on premium economy. I'm going to need a better discount. Otherwise, I'm going to go over to carrier X. And buy it from them instead because my average fare on them already is cheaper. Etc. And so I'm looking to measure and monitor those things.
Grant: Same with hotels. If we're instead of using Four Seasons Hotels now we're using Fairmonts, which are a half a step below a Four Seasons in some cases. And we're seeing better spending in the same city market. Well, it's time to call that Fairmont. And say, hey, we need a discount with you because you can see we produce this much, probably continue producing and I can encourage it through my online booking tool. So measuring and monitoring what I'm actually buying is important. The advanced thing you have there, Elliott, excellent. Leakage is important. And people will try to leak because they think they're going to get more points if they book out the system outside of the system. Outside the channel, meaning the travel agency. It's not true. Yeah. It's not true. And when I have this discussion with travelers saying, hey, I noticed in your expense report that you're booking all your hotels outside of the travel agency system you're paying the same price, dear traveler, and you're getting the same points no matter which way you go. But we know what you're spending and then we can get it. We can actually see better how to negotiate a discount because I'll get that discount going through my travel agency. But I most often will not get it booking direct, even though you could. It's just too complex and people forget to do it and so on. So I like to look at my negotiations and measure and monitor all that. Again, sorry, I keep saying this to you, Elliott. Sorry, long answer to a short question. Nope. I appreciate it. And again, it's the context we want.
Elliott: So we're prepared now. We've talked a few times about communication. Good. Try to communicate the why and the what, right? There's a reason behind what you're doing. Share of that. If it's useful, we could work on some communication type templates Let us know. To try to help you out so that you're not the only one, you know, you're not the only one who is thinking about this doing this So yes, internal messages to your key users or to everyone. What's going on, as Grant said earlier. Leadership messages carry a lot of weight. So it doesn't have to be you sending to everyone. In-app notifications. Let your TMC know as well. So new travel policy is effective We have gotten the feedback that these beige I know notifications are a little hard to see, so that may change. Thank you for the folks who let us know of that. In our newly redesigned tool. And then update your documentation and be ready to discuss this, right? A traveler has a question, a booker has a question, it's good if they're asking. And so you can have a conversation and reinforce this. As opposed to, as Grant said, the person who's similar to it. Gobookununited.com because I know better. Well, and you can put in software that can catch those dot-com bookings. Because those emails generally will come to their company email saying, thank you for using united.com. Here's your booking there's software you can use that can catch those bookings so that you can have those discussions with your travelers. Yep. So, and again, you're not alone. Work with your leadership and your internal communications folks on this. The more you're ready for the conversation, the faster it's going to go. Something I deal with as a marketer when we want to make changes When I'm on top of things, it goes smoothly. But I'm not, I'm up late. And it's no fun.
Elliott: Last but not least, I want to provide the data that we see in AmTrav on supplier discounts. We put out a report earlier this year This is data from those reports. So the savings that we see We are a US-based agency and we're 90% domestic so the discounts And lowest fares that we see are about 3%. That was higher last year when we had American Airlines lowest fares, we counted that, but Southwest and United and actually American all have lower fares via direct connections. Unused tickets, we talked about that. So that's that 6% savings on airfare. That is a big, big opportunity. Airfare is usually the biggest category and that's a large amount of airfare spend funded with unused tickets. Something else I've noticed about that, like the more mature the travel program, the more the unused ticket savings. Why? Because you have to accrue unused tickets in order to redeem unused tickets. Fun fact. But if you are switching providers. Ask for UATP cards. That is another big way to save. We love UATP cards. Hotels, we see 26% savings. When you negotiate property level agreements. That is huge. So those property level agreements are really powerful. When we look at consortia rates, those save about 11%. The other thing about hotels. You got to use the rates to save. If your folks are choosing rates that aren't the corporate rates and are staying at hotels that aren't the corporate rates, it's not going to show that savings.
Grant: This is another reason you want to see that reservation. See the reservation, look at that rate code. And make sure it's the right code with your company name in it so that you are using it. Elliott's absolutely right. And do not let your chain-level rep tell you, oh, I'll just give you a chain one. Go to the property directly and you'll do a lot better. Yeah. Well, and this is something, Grant, do you think that if the economy softens up, do you think that we're going to see more generosity from suppliers? Absolutely, because the wish to have you here instead of across the street at the other hotel or on our airline instead of on another airline, every bit counts even more when they have to work for it and when it's a lower time, they work for it, you'll get a little bit better agreement. What you really want to do as a strategic thinker is to try and bridge that gap between today's world and tomorrow's world where they're sitting pretty again. And they don't need you anymore. Well, a lot of agreements, you got to watch out. They are very unilateral. And so you want to make sure that you put provisions in there to protect yourself for when the market changes, you know, in as much as you can do by the terms of the agreement. And then when it gets renegotiated, because the term runs out, then if there's, if they're sitting a little happier, you're your. Advantage will go down at that point just how it goes.
Elliott: All right, If things go south economically, maybe we'll come back with a
“negotiating with suppliers during a downturn” piece on that and we'll iron out that advice. One other thing, if your travel agency tells you that you're getting, you know that you get 25% savings, 20% savings on hotels that's looking at this number and not mixing it in with the usage of these rates, which if your usage, again, if you're not using, you're not saving. UM. Car rentals, car rentals. We really do see big savings, 34% higher or 34%. They're very generous for AmTrav, this is the second highest category of savings. And it actually ranges. It's lower with an AmTrav deal. It's higher with the corporate deal. We've got clients who are saving 40-50%. Off of published rates, again we do that comparison right in time, right kind of a booking.
Grant: The comparison on your air is going to be a lot more difficult because of NDC, is that we're probably not going to talk about NDC today, but just for everybody that's managing travel, know that that comparison is more difficult. You need to reset your expectations about how to make that comparison between what you would have spent. And what did you spend?
Elliott: So we have had so much fun here in Part I and Part II that I do not have time to go into the AmTrav section. So what I'm going to do is, and actually we don't have any other questions either. If anybody has any questions, drop those now, I will go ahead and. I will go ahead and record that separately and send it out so that you would like to see how AmTrav displays data and how AmTrav handles unused tickets. If you're a user, you can use this for yourself. It'll be 5-10 minutes long. I will put that together and send that out along with this webinar recording we just talked about. So and this was supposed to be Part 3 do do do any last questions. Paula says. “Did you understand that AmTrav shows the lower of the rates between corporate AmTrav?” The corporate for hotels, the corporates always 1st and your corporate is going to be better than the frankly. Like we saw 26% savings with corporate. Oh, and cars. No, it will apply to your agreement. Your agreement will supersede. I don't think we can shop with multiple corporate agreements with the car rental company.
Elliott: All right. I want to thank everybody. And in particular, Grant. If we can help out, I should have put your Relationship Manager in here if we can help out. If you've liked what you heard from Grant and want to chat about things further, I highly recommend Grant. He is the President of Procurigence. If you would like to talk more with AmTrav. Contact my colleague Susan, she would love to hear from you. If you are an AmTrav customer, your Relationship Manager is ready to help. And we really appreciate your time here today. Let us know what we can do for you. We're glad for your business. We want to earn it in the good times, we want to earn it in the slack times. And again, thank you, Grant.
Elliott McNamee
