Kelly Services Implements AirPlus Virtual Cards to Relieve a Painful Payment Process

Kelly Services global travel manager Paula Flowers' corporate card was shut down for suspected fraud six times from 2011 to 2013. Travelers at the temporary staffing agency who didn't have their own corporate cards—including infrequent travelers, contractors, temporary employees and recruits—booked flights on a central business travel account. But Flowers was using her own corporate card for their hotels. On any given night, as many as 60 hotel room nights were on her card.

Kelly Services has workers traveling anywhere their clients need them. "Things change all the time," said Flowers, and only about 20 percent of the hotels the company uses in a year are part of its hotel program. Direct billing would require Kelly Services to apply for credit at each vendor so it could pay later through invoice. Instead, third-party billing to Flowers' card seemed expedient.

Pre-Trip Pain

The process had its own convolutions, though. When nontraditional travelers called preferred agency Carlson Wagonlit Travel to book a hotel, the agency would use Flowers' card, call to ask the hotel to fax a blank credit card authorization form to the travel agency, manually fill out the traveler details and Flowers' billing information and then fax it to Flowers to sign. Flowers would then fax the form back to the hotel. "It was a very labor-intensive process just to get the booking part done," she said. Plus, about a third of the time, the fax confirmations were missing by the time the traveler arrived for check-in, Flowers said. CWT worked as a backstop on that issue by calling the hotels to ensure the fax was on file.

Post-Trip Gaps

About 300 trips worth of hotel charges hit Flowers' card per month, and none of it included traveler names or any identifying data. The bill often would name the hotel chain, but any given chain could have multiple properties in one city, and various Kelly Services travelers could be staying at them. Advanced bookings that fell outside the billing cycle—for example, a deposit charged in May for a trip occurring in September—also made reconciliation tricky. "It would be nothing to literally spend two weeks going back and forth trying to analyze, figure out and allocate those transactions properly," Flowers added.

The Final Straw

Flowers endured this tedium for about five years, but when the card started getting shut down, the picture got grim. It was all hands on deck at CWT. "They had to find out who was using my corporate card that night, then reach out to those hotels and provide another credit card so those people wouldn't have trip interruptions or undue stress," Flowers said. "It was quite the challenge."

That began in 2011, and in 2012, she learned about AirPlus virtual payments. "This was something really new in the industry that a lot of people hadn't heard of at the time," Flowers said.

Flowers, AirPlus and CWT met to determine how to move forward. The group identified what data Kelly Services and CWT needed to provide so AirPlus could process the payments and what data AirPlus and CWT could provide to help Kelly Services reconcile the transactions. Flowers then brought in her company's IT and accounting departments to develop an Excel report that would eliminate the need to enter the 300 monthly transactions into the accounting system manually. "It was a collaboration between CWT, AirPlus and the different internal units so that it wasn't just streamlined for me but also for the accounting department," Flowers said.

Kelly Services launched the AirPlus virtual card solution for hotels in January 2013. The virtual cards pay for room and tax, which are predetermined, and allow a 10 percent cushion for unexpected taxes and fees that may not be listed in the global distribution system. Travelers pay separately for additional charges like food and expense them later.

"It's a huge solution for us," said Flowers. Though virtual cards still require fax confirmations, even the misplaced fax issue has improved dramatically. "It's still a fax," she said, "but the numbers have just dropped."

Now, when Flowers gets the AirPlus statement, she pulls up the Excel report as a check. Generally, the report is 100 percent complete, she said, or perhaps five out of 300 transactions are in question and it takes her no more than 15 minutes to account for the charges. "Then it's done. I email the electronic document to our accounting department and they can pay the bill," she said.