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Your guide to an effective
program review

Business travel is changing. As several countries begin to open up to travel again, the time is right to prepare for life in the ‘new normal’ post COVID-19. Your business travel program and policy will need to be watertight and offer better risk management capabilities and cost-saving opportunities than ever before. From pre-travel to post-trip, it’s time to consider every aspect of your travel program to support your business recovery.

From defining your new objectives to planning your communication strategy, follow this step-by-step guide to make sure you cover every angle.

Table of contents:


Step 1: Define your new goals
The recent COVID-19 pandemic likely means your business travel program goals and priorities will change. Whatever your aims, the key to success lies in ensuring that your travel spend is centralized, meaning that all of your bookers follow the same booking process and use the same platform.

There are 5 big goals in business travel.
You can choose just one or a combination of them. Ensure you select goals that are aligned with your company’s objectives, culture, and traveler satisfaction aims.

  1. Travel risk management: Traveler risk is now more complex and demanding than ever and needs careful consideration. Your Egencia site features many tools that prioritize risk management and traveler support. Make the most of your site to provide the best possible duty of care to your employees. Use your site to get more control over destinations and/or alerts, know where your travelers are traveling, and alert travelers about any pending changes, problems, or emergencies. Learn more

  2. Control your costs: You need to be sure that your travel spend is going to the best use and providing the most value to your organization. Keep costs down without compromising on traveler safety or services and control your travel spend due to reduce budgets. If you follow this route, it’s essential to consider the impact beyond initial savings; traveler satisfaction is key to getting the best out of your people.

  3. Increase savings: As you prepare to hit the road again, it’s vital to leverage savings opportunities where you can. Extensive supply means giving you and your travelers choice. We’re able to surface the best options according to your policy and recommendations. Remember, your travel policy, including per diems, preferred choices, and so on, will be critical to support your savings strategy.

  4. Improve your sustainability impact: As you prepare for travel post COVID-19 lockdown, you're likely thinking about your sustainability goals and how any changes to your travel program might impact them. So, measure and improve your sustainable impact (environment/social/ economy), and provide green suppliers. Egencia Analytics Studio can help you track and report on your air and hotel emissions.

  5. Support your company’s expansion: If you’ve expanded into new markets or recently acquired a new company, it’s a good time to reassess your travel program and align it with evolving company-specific or industry-specific developments.

When defining your new goals, ensure alignment with:
  • Your company’s culture (management’s key objectives and plans)
  • Traveler satisfaction and what level of veto on business travel they may have during this crisis
  • Decision makers and key stakeholders
  • You company policy on when business travel will be allowed and what types of business travels are concerned
  • Local countries and states regulations from your countries and those you travel to for business


Step 2: Analyze and review your performance
Whatever your goals, we recommend you analyze and review your travel program performance. From spend concentration to traveler behavior, you should be able to track your program’s key performance metrics to establish what kind of impact the COVID-19 crisis has made and to help you reassess what type of data you need to see in the future.
Here are 3 groups of data you should use when reviewing your travel policy performance.

General performance*
*Focus on 2019 to avoid skewing data due to the effect of the pandemic

  1. On your Egencia Analytics Studio workspace check your:
    • Annual spend evolution: A change in travel spend is an indicator that you should to review your policy
    • Missed Air savings: Understand the reasons why travelers are not booking the lowest available fare at the time of booking with policy reason code tracking and reporting
    • Online adoption rate: If it’s under 87 percent (Egencia average) we recommend you take action to control offline booking costs
    • Policy compliance: If it’s under 80 percent (Egencia average) review the reasons for out-of-policy bookings using your reasons codes

  2. Offline review your:
    • Out of program spend: The success of your travel policy relies on your ability to apply your guidelines on all your bookings. Review your Travel & Expenses to evaluate the volume of transactions made outside your official booking process
    • Payment means used, and costs: Payments can often be a great source of potential hidden savings (by reducing cost of Travel & Expenses consolidation and management). Read more about choosing the best payment method for you
    • Users’ satisfaction: Consider each stakeholder: Travelers/bookers/approvers to cover all needs and be able to build a holistic action plan as a follow-up

The 5 pillars of your travel policy’s current performance
  1. General guidelines and booking process:
    • Travel Risk Management: Review existing guidelines or check out our recommendations by clicking here. If you don’t have any Travel Risk Management guidelines yet, take a few minutes to read our best practices recommendations
    • Sustainability: Review existing guidelines and compare them to our recommendations by clicking here – if your company has none, take a few minutes to review those best practices recommendations
    • General anticipation/advance purchase: Review how well your rules are respected. If advanced booking isn’t respected, refer to your internal survey to understand why and consider launching an educational campaign
    • Approval: We recommend that you only use approval if your Travel Policy compliance is too low (below 60 percent) or in case of a need to reinforce Travel Risk Management (like during a pandemic)

  2. Air:
    • Air policy compliance: If it’s under 70 percent (Egencia average), this is a sign to review your air policy to promote better adoption, greater cost control, and more savings
    • Total annual Air spend: If your Air spend is over 60K$, you can consider negotiating rates with airlines. And if it’s above 4M$ and includes 3 key countries, you could consider a managed Air Sourcing Program.
    • Air Spend per top countries and top routes: Look at the countries and routes that represent 80 percent of your overall air spend
    • Review your Air Sourcing program: Evaluate your current Negotiated Fare coverage. At Egencia, average coverage with a managed program is 75 percent. Anything below this, and you should renegotiate with your preferred suppliers. Ahead of your negotiation, you should identify where the lack of coverage comes from, including monopoly situations and routes not covered.
    • Top 5 air suppliers: To identify soft savings opportunities like business reward programs
    • Current advanced purchase policy and cabin class rules

  3. Lodging:
    • Hotel policy compliance: If it’s under 88 percent for Lodging (Egencia average), this is a sign you should review your Hotel Policy to promote better adoption, greater cost control, and increase savings
    • Review your Hotel program: List all the destinations collecting 80 percent of the room nights and negotiate directly with properties gathering over 200 room nights. For the rest, use Egencia Preferred Rates. Take the time to remove unused negotiated hotels from the program. Next, define your preferred hotels and chains, including those negotiated directly and those from your Egencia content. Compare the number of hotels used with the number of room nights in order to elect a decent number of preferred hotels. Don’t have a hotel program to review? Read more about how to create a hotel program
    • Length of stay: This is a huge influencer on obtaining different types of rates (dynamic, flexible, seasonal, etc.) or identifying the need for alternative lodging options such as apartment rentals
    • Average rate for top destinations: Focus on your top 5 cities with over 100 room nights per year and review city caps accordingly. For the rest, we recommend travel managers to use city caps at country/region/state level.
    • Current advanced purchase rules

  4. Rail:
    • Define your top 10 routes: To review your preferred supplier agreements – in your negotiation consider rates but also flexible booking conditions, boarding priority, lounge access, and WIFI access
    • Current advanced purchase rules

  5. Car:
    • Spend per partners and category: To review your preferred partners and potential opportunities for negotiated rates
    • Define your top 10 pick-up locations at country level: To review your preferred suppliers
    • Rental type classic vs. one way: To negotiate the dedicated fees for drop off at different locations
    • Pick up location (airport, train station, downtown): As these are subject to specific fees, this is a good way to identify negotiation opportunities
    • Length of rental: To identify if you need to negotiate daily or weekly rates with suppliers
    • Define the authorized category of car

Application:
Review your user groups and policy allowed per user groups.

Put the data to work:
Use our table of recommended actions to review your policy to ensure you succeed in reaching goals. Ensure to collaborate with key stakeholders to define the actions and changes you’ll apply to your travel program.



Step 3: Load on Egencia
Armed with the goals for your relaunched program, and your program performance reports, you can now begin to address how your policies might look in the upcoming weeks and months. On your Egencia site, your travel policy is woven into the solution, so it’s simple for your travelers to stay compliant, and if your travel policy changes, you can update it easily at the touch of a button.

Start by updating your travel policy
If you don’t have a written document yet, check out our Guide to build a travel policy.

Next, review your online settings using 4 simple steps
  1. Update your 5 key pillars by leveraging some of the user guides below:
  2. Review your user groups and profiles
  3. Share your travel policy on your homepage. Learn more
  4. Create a report to track your results


Step 4: Relaunch your travel program
Now it’s time to communicate internally to ensure all your travelers and arrangers are up to speed on any changes you’ve made. Check out the guide below to relaunch your travel program internally and get great results.

Take these 4 steps to communicate your new travel program efficiently:
  1. Get support from a Governing Board Member (or a sponsor)
  2. Re-train your employees
  3. Build an internal awareness campaign with the Egencia Relaunch Toolkit
  4. Post-pandemic, we recommend you share our Travel Safety checklist with your employees, train them on how to redeem their unused tickets, and create a feedback loop for travelers to manage potential anxiety when they start hitting the road again



You’ve officially made it through our top recommendations for efficiently relaunching your business travel program, and you’re now set up for success. Now that you’re feeling more in control when it comes to preparing for travel in the new normal post COVID-19, it’s time to log on to your account and put your expert skills to use.

And remember, you’re not on your own. If you've decided it’s time to prepare for the new normal, we’re here to help. We offer business travel consulting services to help you make the best decisions about your travel program. Learn more