Best Practices

Here are a few best practices when it comes to purchasing travel:

Building a comprehensive
corporate travel Intranet site.

These are helping companies keep travelers informed on everything from policy (who can buy what kind of travel, including which suppliers to use and which kind of flights can be booked), to special fares and rates, to the best way to get from the airport to the local sales office or plant. More often than not, companies with Intranets are attaching online booking systems to these sites. So it's a quick leap from information to reservation.

Encouraging self-booking.

Self-booking sites help companies save significantly--usually about 20 percent for online bookings
compared to those made using a travel agent. Companies like Lucent, Motorola, Thomson
Consumer Electronics and Citibank all have seen significant reductions in ticket prices when travelers researched and booked tickets themselves.

Helping to make the business case for self-booking systems:
they generate savings not only from lower average ticket prices, but also from lower transaction
fees for the corporate travel agency.

Watching meeting spending.

How do you create any kind of purchasing efficiencies when there are dozens if not hundreds
of small meetings being planned at your company and no single person overseeing how they're booked? One way is to pool group purchasing with that of individual travelers. At Microsoft, for example, any travel to a meeting, even if a zone fare is used, is credited to the transient travel air volume, said Kathy Rust, events commodity manager.

A corporate travel Intranet also helps facilitate control over group expenses. Companies like Joseph A. Seagram & Sons, Hewlett-Packard and EMC are keeping meeting costs down by mandating that any offsite meeting be registered through a meetings page on the corporate Intranet. That way, different managers holding meetings in the same city at the same time can book together, get preferential hotel rates for a multi-meeting contract and potentially save on ancillary meeting items, such as catering, ground transportation and air.

Many companies are also keeping an eye on meeting spending by using the Diners Club or American Express corporate meeting card. At Storage Technology Corporation, the streamlined procurement
and payment process of the Amex Meeting Card gets high marks from Randy Krumpeck, manager
of travel and meeting services. Krumpeck, who estimates his company charges about $2 million annually on the Card, said that "it's making life much easier for us because we now cut a single
check once a month to pay our meeting bills, where before we were sitting down a dozen or
so times each month to prepare multiple payments to vendors. On top of that, our company is saving thousands of dollars, because we're holding on to our money longer."For information: www.dinersclub.com or www.americanexpress.com.