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Management BTN 2018 Best Practitioner

Johnson Factors Quality into Airline Metrics

By Michael B. Baker / September 14, 2018 / Contact Reporter
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When Shawn Johnson took charge of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints' travel program in 2013, he couldn't help but notice travel management tended to bring "a hyperfocus on managing and lowering costs." As such, many of the metrics used—particularly airline cost per mile, per segment and per traveler—only told part of the story he needed to know to manage travel effectively.

He set out to develop a new metric that better showed an airline's value to the LDS church travel program. This would be especially useful as the church sought to consolidate the number of carriers it worked with for its massive program, which on any given day could feature some of its more than 65,000 missionaries, as well as other travelers going to nearly any country in the world.

After consulting a large swath of leaders and travelers across the organization and working with consultants, Johnson created a new metric: quality cost per mile. That metric includes easily quantifiable data related to airline relationship quality—such as on-time rankings, cancellation percentages and baggage handling performance—as well as qualitative elements. For example, how well does an airline handle rebooking in emergency situations? What sort of benefits does it offer travelers? How effective is a carrier's sales team in providing reporting and responding to needs?

Using in-house and third-party data, Johnson and his team compiled those factors to create a quality factor rating for each airline partner that then could be weighed into the standard cost-per-mile metric.

With that metric in place, Johnson has noted better relationships both with airlines and LDS church travelers. Airlines now understand that the church values more than pure cost savings, which has improved dialogue and pushed airlines to strive for optimal performance, Johnson said. Traveler satisfaction, meanwhile, also has grown over the past few years.

Next up, Johnson is looking at integrating those metrics more deeply in quarterly reviews and in the RFP process, as well as finding similar applications in other parts of travel, such as hotels.

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