Profile In Travel Management: Deloitte Pre-Trip Tool Cuts Internal Travel - 2009-11-16

Company: Deloitte
Headquarters: New York
2008 U.S. Booked Air volume: $273 million

Deloitte this year vastly decreased its discretionary travel through a new pre-trip approval process that identified internal, non-client-facing and non-revenue-generating travel through an automated system that sends bookings to approvers before reservations are ticketed.

The international accounting and consulting firm is expanding the program to the rest of its U.S. business units and subsidiaries.

Company recruiters also have been brought onto the platform to approve travel reservations of job candidates, paid through a ghost card. The global security team could use the system to review reservations before employees travel to high-risk destinations.

Following the implementation of the pre-trip approval system in three of the company's four client-facing business units, Deloitte's discretionary travel decreased 71 percent year-over-year in the March through June period, while overall travel fell 35 percent. In 2008, the company had $273 million in U.S. booked air volume and $975 million in U.S. T&E expenditure.

In response to the recession, Deloitte looked to cut costs, and the travel team set out to reduce travel without impacting clients and revenues. Through a review process that began in late 2008, the team categorized travel as client-driven and revenue-generating, internal but necessary, or discretionary and unnecessary.

Discretionary trips made up about 28 percent of the company's airline tickets last year, according to senior manager of travel procurement and operations Brian Nichols. Even after those trips faced the knife, Deloitte expects to book about 350,000 air tickets in 2009.

Each trip a Deloitte traveler books with preferred travel management company BCD Travel or the online Orbitz for Business International platform—which Deloitte rolled out to all U.S. travelers in October—has a charge code associated with it. The code is reviewed by BCD Travel's TripSource Authorizer pre-trip approval system, and if it falls into the discretionary travel category, it is e-mailed to an approver, who can access the itinerary to approve or deny the request.

The system first launched in the company's audit and enterprise risk unit, later expanding to other U.S. business units. Each rollout took about six weeks, including the programming of approval criteria, approver training and communications.

Nichols said that business unit executive leadership was critical in achieving success. Travel services reports into procurement, so the pre-trip initiative was reviewed by finance, compliance and procurement executives "to make sure they were OK with it in concept and they were going to be behind the change management and be willing to communicate down," Nichols said. The company's policy and compliance teams jointly worked with travel services on the project.

"This was not something travel decided to do," he said. "The business leaders decided to do it and asked travel to help them."

Deloitte's business units used several methods of relaying word of the new system, but those that employed a strong top-down communications approach were the most effective, Nichols said. On the other hand, one unit that embarked on the process without executive communications, instead using regional office contacts, showed less-effective results, he said.

Pre-implementation communications to travelers about the new process helped ensure lower fares wouldn't be lost and bottlenecks of trips awaiting approval would be avoided. "It put the onus back on the travelers and approvers," he said.

While there are some ways to measure the effectiveness of the pre-trip approval system, its greatest value for Deloitte is unquantifiable.

"You can obviously measure the number of itineraries that go through the process. That's easy," Nichols said. "You can tell how many were rejected or went forward for ticketing. The part that actually has the strongest impact, which you can't measure, is that you communicated this to the travelers and they are aware that it takes place, and many simply choose not to attempt to book a trip that they are pretty sure might be rejected. You can measure the hard numbers, but that awareness in the traveler's mind that this is going to occur when they try to book something that isn't necessary is where the real strength of this is."