Profiles In Travel Management: Small Co. Centralizes Online Booking
Seth Harris, Business Travel News, 7/9/2007
A small technology management consulting firm has lowered its agency expenditures through a policy that requires employees to make all travel arrangements through an onsite travel coordinator, who then books nearly all travel through an online booking tool.
Though Wakefield, Mass.-based Edgewater Technology mandated that its 300 employees—250 of whom are travelers—were to have their travel booked by an Edgewater-employed central travel coordinator in 2001, the company began to see savings through lower transaction fees after adopting the Cliqbook online booking tool for the travel coordinator alone to use in 2003.
As a result, more than 89 percent of all bookings are made via Cliqbook, which resulted in $22,000 in overall savings last year—a noteworthy amount, considering Edgewater's bill in the last fiscal year was $512,000 for air, $42,000 for car rental and $113,000 for hotel, said executive assistant Angela Plourde, who oversaw the implementation of the company's first managed travel program in 2001 when it signed with Milford, Mass.-based Atlas Travel International.
The move to centralize was well-received by Edgewater's travelers, who were notified of the procedural changes via e-mails sent by senior management and who have adhered to the policy, according to Plourde.
While the method of booking travel online exclusively through a travel coordinator is not a conventional practice, it has fit into Edgewater's corporate culture. "It starts with learning about the culture of the company," said Atlas Travel president and CEO Elaine Osgood. "They felt strongly that they wanted to develop an online program and that they wanted one person managing that program. Their transactions are such that the process works. It's not a very time-consuming transaction overall. It's domestic and point-to-point."
Neither Plourde nor Osgood would disclose Edgewater's transaction fees.
Edgewater's travel is almost exclusively domestic, mainly from Boston to Little Rock, Ark., where the company has a branch office, and to destinations in the Northeast, including Newark, N.J., and Philadelphia. Though Edgewater's air spend is on the rise—at $280,000 for the first half of 2007—there are no plans to alter the booking process, Plourde said.
"If the additional air volume is similar to what they have been doing, which is point-to-point domestic travel, then they can keep the system in place as long as the one person can handle it," Osgood said. "It's definitely manageable with a little tweaking."
Before the automated booking process was put in place, Plourde said relatively all of the company's bookings were "manual agent-assisted travel."
"It was susceptible to human error, and the online booking tool was a step in the right direction," Plourde said.
Plourde spearheaded the 2001 choice of Atlas as Edgewater's travel management company. "We definitely were looking for something local and to know we weren't just a number," Plourde said about the decision to go with the regional travel management company. One of the first steps afterward was to establish a firm travel policy. "If they had a policy in place, it just wasn't anything that was updated or of any substance," said Osgood.
Edgewater found immediate benefits, notably through reconciling air ticket voids, which was a recurring problem in the days preceding Atlas. "Atlas saved us $44,000 with voids," Plourde said. "If you were to book a trip with Delta online and then your plans changed, you lost money. Now if a traveler changes a plan within 24 hours, they can void it for us."
Recognizing the additional savings an online booking tool could bring to Edgewater, Plourde began working with Atlas to implement Cliqbook. "We were one of the first Atlas customers to switch over to Cliqbook. We were sort of the test case," Plourde said.
Edgewater has implemented other applications that have enhanced its ability to control spending, including Cornerstone Information Systems' IBank Analytics tool, which offers consolidated travel data reporting to Edgewater's chief financial officer, who handles supplier contracts, Plourde said. "With that, we can customize all kinds of reports," she said. "We can add on reporting options when we book trips for people, and we need to be able to tell what they are traveling for. We are a public company and we need to keep track of that."