Thomson Consumer Electronics

<B>Thomson Consumer Electronics</B>


<B>Headquarters:</B> Indianapolis

<B>1999 U.S. booked air volume:</B> $10 million

<B>Worldwide T&E:</B> $55 million

<B>Worldwide hotel volume:</B> $8 million

<B>Innovation:</B> Proactively communicating information to travelers to promote compliance with hotel policy.


As part of her duties as manager of corporate travel for the Americas at Thomson Consumer Electronics, Debbie Shircliff has been working on increasing usage of the hotel program by travelers at the company's six Mexican manufacturing facilities in Juarez, Torreon and Mexico City. "We have more than 500 travelers in Mexico," said Shircliff. "In anticipation of these travelers being able to book hotels on our online booking tool, we're providing training online, but the training documents weren't in Spanish."

Fortunately, Shircliff is Spanish-speaking, so over the past few weeks she translated some of the material for the new system to make sense for Thomson travelers. In the process, Shircliff learned a fundamental lesson about managing a hotel program--or any aspect of travel management--in a global environment: "You've got to be sensitive to local custom and tradition," she said. "When it comes to the training documents, literal translations often don't convey the specialized content accurately. If you aren't careful, an academic translation can even backfire and you end up miscommunicating."

As she goes about her job of managing a hotel program with approximately 100 hotels, effective communications are crucial to driving familiarity with and compliance to the program. Indianapolis-based Thomson has about 2,000 travelers in the Americas, which includes the United States, Canada and South America, in addition to Mexico.

In the worldwide Thomson organization, Shircliff and her counterparts in Paris and Singapore report to manager of corporate travel worldwide Cindy Heston. The Paris office manages the travel of another 2,000 employees, while the Singapore office is responsible for 500. "We each negotiate for hotels in our own region, which are then used by our travelers from anywhere in the world," said Shircliff. The total annual hotel spend is more than $8 million.

The 100 hotels she deals with in the Americas are located in 80 to 90 cities, the majority of which are in the United States. Two years ago, Thomson undertook a major consolidation of its hotel program in the Americas, which first brought home to Shircliff and others in the travel management group the importance of proactive communications.

"In Indianapolis, for example, we went from working with 10 hotels down to three," she said. "The need for the consolidation was certainly clear. It allowed us to give more volume to these fewer hotels. This, in turn, strengthened our negotiating position. Plus, there was less administrative work, which was a cost saving in itself."

The only problem Thomson encountered was that the travelers affected didn't understand why they suddenly had fewer hotel options to choose from. "While it was clear to us, our end-users were somewhat disgruntled by the change," she said. "We hadn't done a good enough job communicating the benefits to the company."

This realization created a new opportunity for the communications/educational travel program seminars that Thomson had been holding each year in Indianapolis. The next day-and-a-half event is scheduled for September. Attending will be 25 to 30 administrative personnel who are among the travel arrangers at sites around the company. "Not only do the seminars help educate this important audience about different aspects of the entire travel program, but they build buy-in in the program as well," Shircliff said.

She sees seminar participants as an informal network for feedback. "They're out in the field and I can rely on them for input regarding the quality of the preferred hotels near their sites," she said. "They're my eyes and ears."

Similarly, whenever Shircliff meets with travel arrangers--or travelers--at training meetings around the company, she is sure to take people through the travel pages on Thomson's intranet site. Included are general travel policy information and the hotel database accessible worldwide. To capture new employees' attention, Shircliff and others on the travel management team also include travel policy information in new hire packets.

For Shircliff, the idea is to get out as many instructive messages about the travel program--whether through print, the Internet or face-to-face meetings--as she can. "After all," she said, "you're not going to reach everyone with every message.