2018 U.S.-Booked Air
Volume: $93 million
Primary U.S. Air Suppliers: Delta,
American, United
Primary U.S. Hotel Suppliers: Marriott, Choice, InterContinental
Primary U.S. Car Rental Suppliers: Enterprise/National, Hertz
Primary U.S. Online Booking Tool: E-Travel
Management
Primary U.S. Payment Supplier: Bank
of America
BTN named Shawn Johnson, who then was support services
director for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, as one of its
2018 Best Practitioners for developing the quality cost per mile key performance
indicator. At the time, he said he wanted to use the metric, which launched in
2017, in rfps and to expand to other supplier categories. And so, last year,
his program executed several regional airline rfps that improved service and quality
cost per mile, and it got the ball rolling in hotel and car rental by
developing initial quality measures for those categories. The idea is to
quantify traveler friction elements—for air, that meant factors like on-time
rankings, baggage handling performance, response to travelers' needs,
frequent-flier programs, sales team and reporting—to factor alongside price
considerations when measuring the value of the church's supplier partnerships.
The church has a single global travel policy and for several
years has had an Amadeus tool in place that automatically books the church's
missionaries, which number 65,000, based on preferred airlines and travel
schedules. The system is essentially touchless with some quality assurance from
agents. The agents thus can use the gained time to focus more on the
missionaries' visa needs. The church implemented a duty of care program in
2018, called travelsafe that is more established and more visible within the
company than the church's previous duty of care program. The church's U.S.-booked
air volume stayed flat from 2017 to 2018, and it estimates that figure to stay
the same in 2019, as well.