San Francisco - Speaking here at press
briefing during an Association of Corporate Travel Executives conference, Carlson
Wagonlit Travel Solutions Group leaders outlined several projects in
development, including a traveler scorecard, advisory services on "adaptable
travel policies" and indexing how travel affects individual productivity.
CWT Solutions Group in
about a month will complete a beta version of a traveler scorecard, which it
will test with a single client company, said vice president Nick Vournakis
said. The tool aggregates individual travelers' data so they can quickly see
how many total miles they have flown, how many nights they have stayed in a
hotel, their most-used suppliers and other information.
With that data, travelers
can benchmark against other employees in their company, business unit and
demographic set, according to CWT Solutions Group Americas senior director Joel
Wartgow. Companies also can select the key metrics they want to monitor—online
booking tool usage or advance purchase policy compliance, for example—and
include those in the scorecard. From there, companies could introduce
incentives, gaming elements or other methods to encourage adherence to travel
policies.
"A travel policy is
like a concrete cinderblock," Vournakis said. "If you just give that
to a traveler, it's heavy and onerous. This gives context and can maybe turn
the angle of the lens to talk about corporate or business unit objectives."
The group also plans to
begin working with companies on developing "adaptive travel policies"
to replace the one-size-fits-all model that many companies use. Adaptive
policies refer not to the unwritten, looser policies that many companies have
for elite and executive travelers, but rather to a policy with varying
requirements based on demographic research within a company, Vournakis explained.
Such a policy might have
different requirements for frequent and non-frequent travelers, he said.
Frequent travelers, for example, might be given more leeway on skipping
inconvenient airline itineraries with early departure times or layovers that
are the lowest logical airfare available, while an infrequent traveler might be
allowed to use a cab instead of a train when visiting an unfamiliar city.
"You can be
stringent when it makes sense, and you can be more lenient when it makes sense,"
Wartgow said. "It doesn’t necessarily apply only to frequency. It's where
it fits on each trip."
Vournakis also spoke of
creating an "index of travel stress" to evaluate the "hidden
cost of travel." Such an index would assess traveler data, including how
often they travel, what level of service they use in hotels and airlines and
whether they travel to countries with political unrest.
"This could help
[travel buyers] understand when investing into duty of care," he said. "We
are in the initial phases of trying to conduct this research."