Travel Management: The Egencia Way

In times of economic uncertainty, when the need to curb expenses by all means has become predominant across enterprises, CIOs are often a worried lot. They are asked to do more with less all the time and it is here that IT often comes to the rescue. One of the areas where technology and eventually CIOs could rein in costs is travel management.

Travelling The Path To Reduced Costs

According to a recent survey carried out by Egencia.com, travel is the second most controllable expense among enterprises/ SMEs. Egencia is a travel management company that was launched in 2002 as Expedia Corporate Travel. The company’s survey explores the impact of the global economic slowdown on corporate travel management trends and the supply environment for corporate travel. While Average Ticketing Prices (ATPs) for hot corporate travel destinations like Delhi and Mumbai have decreased by as much as 50 percent, the supply side dynamics have also changed due to restricting factors like capacity cuts and consolidation/ alliance co-ordination.

Today, the profile of a CIO has evolved and it is restricted not only to effectively managing the scale of IT infrastructure but also involves a decision-making role in significant business aspects like cost cutting.

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Corporate Travel Management – A B2B Offering

Egencia functions as an end-to-end travel management company. Its portfolio of services includes everything a corporate traveller needs right from the moment he steps out to embark on his journey till the time he gets back to the office. Some of these services include booking air tickets, arranging passports and visas, booking hotels, co-ordinating car rentals and even organising meetings in certain niche markets. While Expedia is a B2C offering similar to online retail travel sites like Yatra.com, EzeeGo.com etc, Egencia specialises only in B2B offerings.

Elaborating further on the Egencia Global Survey, Gaurav Sundaram, country director, Egencia India says, “Indian enterprises are increasingly coming to terms with the business reality that corporate travel represents the second largest controllable cost. Our study indicates that ATPs for Delhi and Mumbai have dipped by as much as 50 percent. Bangalore too has faced a downslide of almost 35 percent. Incidentally, Bangalore remains the least affected across APAC as far as lodging prices are concerned, which indicates the impact of the downturn elsewhere.”

The current recession represents a big opportunity for CIOs and travel managers to question the status quo and leverage immediate opportunities to secure long term savings through sound travel management practices and this is where Egencia.com can be of some help with its bouquet of B2B offerings.

The Egencia Solution

Egencia creates an enterprise-level, dynamic travel policy management system for its clients, which in turn creates a framework across multiple lines of business. Secondly, it offers a whole lot of options as far as travel customisation is concerned. Due to this, the employee can avail of various choices. For example, he can pick the car of his choice for travel. The travel policy can also be suitably amended for a particular individual. It is almost like ordering a custom-made product.

Egencia’s system arms the travel manager with handy tools and automates the process of travel requisition with every user being given a unique user ID and password to request a booking.

A natural question that comes to mind here is ‘What is wrong with going the usual way and booking the trip from a B2C travel site like Yatra, MakeMyTrip etc or from a local travel agent?’ After all, they too promise the ’lowest airfares’. What really is the benefit and why should a CIO invest in such a solution?

Sundaram explains, “The biggest difference lies in price. The pricing strategy works differently for corporate and retail travel. So the actual saving is not only on the transaction, but also on a preferred vendor contract. What this means is an enterprise may have an arrangement with a preferred airline and it may trickle down to benefits in terms of prices, accumulated miles etc. This is not possible in retail travel arrangements as you tend to lose corporate-level discounting when you switch airlines.”

Egencia.com goes one step further and allows clients to switch to a preferred airline once the latter has exhausted all the possibilities of extracting benefits from its current vendor in a calendar year.

The Benefits

Sundaram says, “Today, most enterprises work globally and have multiple offices across the country and around the world. In such a situation, there is no single, centralised solution through which they can gauge how much they are actually spending on travel. This happens because every office is managed individually and they work across multiple platforms co-ordinating with local travel agents. Also, travel reports are scheduled to be submitted as per a fixed timeline, for example, every fortnight, quarter or year. Egencia’s solution allows clients to track their global spend on travel in real time via reports, which are issued instantly or can be scheduled as per client preference.”

Sundaram also stresses the fact that as the whole process of travel requisition and approval on Egencia is automated, it reduces the ’time cost’ an employee invests in getting a travel ticket done.

Pam Keenan Fritz, senior vice president with Egencia North America, says, “We’ve seen corporate travel buyers trending towards more active spend management. Our clients are controlling spend through greater use of advanced booking, unused ticket tracking and more rigorous policy enforcement. Other travel procurement initiatives include re-negotiating supply contracts and enforcing the use of a single corporate travel provider to optimise travel spend management.”

Security Issues

All transactions conducted through Egencia’s travel management tool use credit cards and no cash or cheque payment is entertained. So how are these transactions secured? What are the steps taken to prevent data misuse?

“Egencia stores and treats all data in a very secure manner. Most of the data is encrypted as it is transferred between systems and stored in accordance with data security and compliance standards. We have an entire team at Expedia that deals with secure storage of data. Examples of data stored securely include credit card information, itinerary information, and other personally identifiable information (PII). Egencia also does not sell any customer information to third parties. No travel itinerary is booked unless it is approved by the concerned authority,” says Sundaram.

Enterprises can surely curb their global spend on travel and actively manage the same with automated tools like that offered by Egencia.