Employee compliance with travel policies and time spent booking travel are areas for improvement at most companies, according to a survey released today of 500 travel buyers from companies with annual revenues of $100 million or more. The survey, conducted by Lieberman Research Worldwide for Rearden Commerce, found that only 38 percent of employees use preferred vendors all of the time and, on average, visit 4.2 Web sites to research and schedule each trip.
Rearden's survey revealed that while nine out of 10 employees are aware of their company's preferred vendors, less than four in 10 use them all of the time. Excluding the 2 percent who said they did not use preferred vendors or did not measure their preferred vendor usage, the remainder said they used preferred vendors some of the time. It should be noted, however, that Rearden only gave respondents the opportunity to say if their travelers used preferred vendors all of time, some of the time and none of the time, and did not provide participants with a "most of the time" answer selection, forcing those whose travelers may have booked travel out of policy rarely in the past 12 months to choose "some of the time" as an answer.
"What most employees do not realize is that corporate rebates and incentives are enacted when the employee population reaches thresholds outlined in their vendor contracts," Jeff Pulver, vice president of marketing at Rearden, said in a statement. "While an employee thinks the actual cost of his or her airline ticket is $500, the actual cost may be much less. And, in most cases preferred supplier contracts contain volume commitments that, if not met, could jeopardize an entire contract and cost the company millions in lost discounts based on nonperformance."
The results also divulged that more than 40 percent of employees are researching and scheduling business services on an average of 4.2 different Web sites. "This shouldn't come as a surprise," said Patrick Grady, chairman and CEO of Rearden Commerce. "We've reached a state of diminishing returns. Every time there's a new application, a new device, a new service, there's a further learning curve. When you log onto a corporate intranet, you're looking at scores of separate applications, different passwords, different log-ons, different business logic and they don't integrate into your address book, they don't integrate into your calendar, you have to manually cut and paste things, which are error prone by definition."
Rearden provided the research to focus attention on areas served by its purchasing platform, which includes online air booking, car rental and chauffeured transportation services, as well as packaged shipping and other office services
(BTN, Oct. 17, 2005). Currently, the company said it has 12 corporate customers, with 20 more serious prospects.