Companies turn to self-booking tools for travel savings
Spanish companies are increasingly turning to self-booking tools to lower their travel spending. These applications can save 25% on travel agency fees and 9% on average airline ticket prices, according to Forum Business Travel at a conference held yesterday in Madrid.
Spanish companies are aware of the great savings that can be obtained with online self-booking tools. As explained by Inmaculada de Carlos, head of purchasing at Johnson & Johnson Medical and keynote speaker at the Forum Business Travel (FBT) session, the advantages of these applications are multiple.
“In addition to cost savings, they also improve the quality of information, enable real-time changes, increase control of booking processes and allow routing to preferred suppliers,” De Carlos detailed.
Self-booking tools are slowly making their way into companies but, as Oscar García, founding partner of FBT, points out, they still present two difficulties: “They do not allow 100% of transactions and, for the moment, do not integrate train reservations”.
According to Inmaculada de Carlos, companies that incorporate these tools start to make them profitable after 30% of transactions have been made with them. To reach this level of adoption, a training program for users is necessary so that the use within the company is extended to as many travelers as possible.
As Iacute;ñigo García-Aranda, Marketing Director of Amadeus Spain, points out, cost savings thanks to these tools are more than proven, but if they are not widely used, they are not achieved. Our recommendation is to define together with the agency detailed adoption plans from the beginning.
María Ribes, Head of Sales for Key Accounts at American Express Barceló Viajes, says: "It is vitally important to define a realistic and achievable online adoption target, as well as the continuous training provided to users. It is the combination of these parameters that guarantees to optimize compliance with the travel policy up to 98%.
At this point, Forum Business Travel stresses that “each company must develop its own implementation plan, depending on whether it chooses to impose the use of the tool, or simply recommend it”.
Some companies are creating incentive plans to promote its use through "positive reinforcement".
For Marcos Franco, marketing director of Transhotel,
the mission of wholesalers is to provide, in addition to an extensive and competitive product, the technological tools for agencies to implement self-booking systems tailored to the needs of each client”.
More than 70 travel managers from medium and large companies participated in several roundtable discussions that insisted on the need to create imaginative incentive programs to prevent overly taxing positions from generating adverse reactions among traveling employees.
Among the ideas discussed, the travel managers pointed to the establishment of bonuses with redeemable points based on the proportion of each employee's use of the tool or the percentage saving on the average price per trip.