How One Company Worked with VisaHQ

"The first time I sat with [the new Domino's CEO], he said to me, 'We need to make international travel less painful for our team members,'" said Becky Kalucki, travel and events manager for the pizza chain. Richard Allison became CEO of Domino's in July 2018, 16 months after Kalucki herself had joined in March 2017 to implement a structured global travel program so the company could better track and control international travel spend as it expanded globally. 

Of the 4,000 corporate employees of Domino's, 850 travel globally, including to the company's offices in almost 90 countries. "We try to visit all of our markets as often as we are able to, so we are in and out of all of them quite often," Kalucki said. In addition, the company employs a lot of expatriates. That adds up to plenty of opportunity for friction in travel visa paperwork.

The process would go something like this: A traveler would download a visa application; fill it out; gather required documentation on vaccinations, insurance and the like; and mail it all to a third-party courier service in Washington, D.C., which checked for all required components and walked them to the destination country's embassy. For travel to some countries, travelers could apply online, uploading the required documentation.

However, travelers also manually researched what type of visas they needed. "They would spend days researching on dot-gov sites and then going, 'I don't know if I am filling out the right application or not,'" Kalucki said. Travelers also struggled to figure out what documentation they needed for any given application. Depending on the visa type and country, a traveler might be required to provide a letter of invitation, travel itinerary, vaccination records, photographs, travel insurance, proof of financial support or other documents.

The process so overwhelmed travelers that many would "shove it off on their admin assistants," who were just as overcome. Plus, records tended to evaporate whenever an administrative assistant left the company. "The information that was housed with the visa application somehow disappeared or was destroyed during the transition of responsibilities," she said. Thus, when travelers needed to revisit a country again, they'd have to start over. Additionally, some of the questions are personal and in-depth, and so Kalucki felt uncomfortable having assistants so heavily involved.

Selling a Change Up the Chain

In preparation for offices opening in Dubai, Hong Kong and Amsterdam, Kalucki in August 2018 brought in visa and passport solutions provider VisaHQ, with which she had worked at her previous company. To secure leadership buy-in, she argued that it would save the company time and help track visa applications and documentation. "My leadership was advanced in the thinking we can save hours and the hours we save are going to equate to greater dollar savings," Kalucki said.

The priority the CEO had placed on enhancing the international travel experience made the sell all the easier. Domino's also views itself as a technology company and wanted to partner with vendors that fit that view. In the past few years, the company has experimented with chatbots, autonomous vehicles and drones. Partnering with VisaHQ seemed right to Kalucki. "We want to partner with people that are really embracing technology and making things easier for consumers, and in this instance, the consumer is our own team members and travelers," she said.

How It Works

VisaHQ hosts a Domino's-branded website, which links to Concur Travel and Expense. The site lists government restrictions, such as countries to which travel is not allowed and government travel advisories. It also allows travelers to fill out profiles with standard information like citizenship, birthday and country of residence, which auto-fills in future visa applications.

The system then guides each traveler to the right visa application and through the process in a tax software-like format. "They are very specific and guide you directly based on your own requirements," Kalucki said. "I don't have to guess as to what visa a particular country or traveler needs. They outline it each time, based on the individual traveler and their specific itinerary." As needed, VisaHQ translates applications into travelers' native languages for this process and then translates the information back to the original languages upon submission.

The system also remembers other information as travelers fill out applications. "If one question is asked for China's application and it's an obscure question, it will transfer and hold it into the system and apply to any [other country's] application that asks the question," Kalucki said. Travelers can grant administrative assistants permission to complete applications on their behalf.

Travelers can submit for e-visas through VisaHQ; for other applications, VisaHQ delivers them to the appropriate embassy. Before submission, VisaHQ manually affirms that all the required information is filled out, that required documents are uploaded or emailed or mailed to VisaHQ.

All that information is in safe hands, Kalucki said. Her company's information security system thoroughly vetted VisaHQ. To ensure data security, VisaHQ regularly conducts penetration tests on its systems. It also complies with the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation, said VisaHQ head of global strategic partnerships Erin Kopp.

Users can track the progress of their applications and refer to past ones. "If somebody had a China application two years ago, they can actually go back in and pull that China application and have that information handy, whereas before, people were searching through paper files," Kalucki said.

VisaHQ also enables travelers to register their trips with the relevant embassies at their destinations, facilitating an often-overlooked best practice for crossborder travel. Meanwhile, in the event of a stolen or lost visa, VisaHQ can provide documentation to the embassy quickly or Kalucki and her team can pull up the information from VisaHQ's system to expedite replacement.

Before Domino's implemented VisaHQ, Kalucki said, 25 percent of her travelers' visa applications were returned, though never rejected, because of missing documents or letters of authorization lacking required information. Now, 99.5 percent are submitted successfully on the first try. She said, "It now allows us to focus on more important things than filling out paperwork."