As PricewaterhouseCoopers United Kingdom’s serviced
apartments spend crested £7 million (US$10.5 million), it decided 2015 was the
year to consolidate the expenditure for the first time. It achieved much more
besides. “Initially, we wanted to see if we could leverage our rates better,
but the request for proposals process evolved into something different,” said
PwC head of U.K. hotels and venues Samantha van Leeuwen. Now, PwC’s travel team
has an entire serviced apartment arm.
The new PwC Serviced Apartments not only has given the
professional services firm better prices but also has enabled travelers to book
faster, vastly reduced the workload for the existing travel management team,
improved spend oversight and improved tax regulation compliance.
PwC uses serviced apartments for client projects, employee
relocation and as an alternative to hotels for transient business travelers. “A
lot of our people come to London and to some extent Manchester and Birmingham
four nights a week,” said van Leeuwen. “It is more economical for them to stay
in an apartment and also gives them a home away from home.”
Though she was uncertain how much the company’s serviced
apartments spend totalled at the time, van Leeuwen knew volume was heading
north because PwC is growing and taking on more projects and because its
workforce is becoming increasingly multinational and transient.
Extended-stay accommodations are a different beast in the
United Kingdom than in the United States. Such properties, including serviced
apartments, are rarely bookable through global distribution systems. “Travel
management companies are not set up to manage serviced apartments,” said van
Leeuwen. “There is a lack of management information.” Instead, U.K. serviced
apartment companies distribute their product through specialist booking
agencies.
As a result of its RFP, PwC appointed two such preferred
inventory suppliers: Go Native and The Serviced Apartment Co., or SACO. PwC
also outsourced its serviced apartments process to Go Native. Two Go Native
employees comprise PwC Serviced Apartments and work from a PwC office in London
to plan, book, bill and deliver reporting. If they can’t find anything through
Go Native and SACO for any given request, they search the general marketplace.
The service also handles bookings for a property leased in its entirety by PwC.
Van Leeuwen is delighted with the results. “We are getting
good rates, but the real value has been getting a good process,” she said. “We
used to have to instruct the TMC how to book apartments, but now we have
reduced our workload and are making more use of our preferred apartment
suppliers, all channeled through two people. Centralization also means we can
keep a much better eye on costs and reporting is pretty much instantaneous. We
used to have to wait a long time for it.”
Go Native also has created a tool that provides tax-related
management information. “We have a tax obligation when it comes to serviced
apartments,” said van Leeuwen. “There’s a benefit-in-kind element which doesn’t
arise when staying in hotels.” Van Leeuwen and Go Native also have integrated
with PwC U.K.’s travel security provider, International SOS, to forward
apartment booking data into its traveler-tracking tool.
Van Leeuwen has mixed views, though, about online booking.
She sees value in moving the process online for short-term bookings but not for
longer stays, which frequently require the PwC Serviced Apartments team to
liaise with properties to see if they can move around inventory to accommodate
an extended booking.
Travel managers from other companies interested in booking
space in PwC’s leased apartment building are set to be disappointed. Van
Leeuwen’s team did consider offering inventory externally, but because multiple
PwC employees can share each apartment, bringing in outsiders was deemed
inappropriate. But that’s not a huge loss for PwC, which benefits from
significant financial savings from the program even if occupancy in the
building is as low as 70 percent.
This report originally appeared in the November 2015
edition of Travel Procurement.