Profiles InTravel Management: Doing More With Less

Doing More with Less

Company: Chiron Corp.

Headquarters: Emeryville, Calif.

U.S. air spend: $8 million



Linda Gray, travel and meetings manager of pharmaceutical and biotechnical company Chiron Corp., has been "doing more or the same, with less" as she educates her travelers, unconventionally negotiates rates and keeps a close eye on her budget.

Chiron has been among those thriving companies that have continued to stand firmly on their feet as the economy staggers. However, Gray is not among the beneficiaries of the frugal company's positive growth. "We've been fortunate about making money, but in the same respect we've been careful about how we're spending money," Gray said. "Our travel volume has not decreased and that places a big strain on my budget. There's no money to fund anything additional, and our transaction counts for the agency are decreasing so I could use another agent but I don't have the funds for that."

Gray has made a priority of driving adoption of Sabre's GetThere online booking tool, putting together a clearer travel policy and making use of all the tools in the tool box. Chiron also gets a little help with corporate hotel rates from Switzerland-based pharmaceutical giant Novartis, which holds nearly half of Chiron's stock and has given Gray a leg up in negotiations. "Novartis owns a part of Chiron and we piggyback on their hotel rates," Gray said. "I do my own negotiations and then we exchange information with Novartis."

At the beginning of this year, Gray was shooting for a year-end online booking tool adoption rate of 20 percent. Since then, she has driven adoption of GetThere from 4 percent a year ago to 17 percent in September, with a good possibility of meeting her goal. Instead of mandates, Gray has used a "soft marketing touch" to promote GetThere among travelers and has found the carrot more motivational than the stick. Incentives, education and accessibility have been the primary tools used to increase the rate. "I'm always reminding people that it's there, offering training classes, updating the training material and trying to make things more accessible," she said.

However, her efforts have been met with some resistance. More than 50 percent of bookings at Chiron are booked through agency administrators, a high number that Gray has been trying to decrease by weaning travelers off of the phone and getting them online. "They use phones entirely too much, so another thing that we're finalizing right now is an automated request form that will be on our Web site," Gray said. "They will click on it, fill it in, save it and that will generate an e-mail to the agency." Travelers' dependence on telephones not only has created more work for administrators but also more busy signals, a problem for travelers with pending emergencies. To give assistance to travelers in distress, Gray has put in place an emergency phone number for the company's top frequent travelers, who account for about 300 to 400 of Chiron's 1,000 travelers.

Gray this year also is beginning to make use of GetThere's meeting product, DirectMeetings. "We have it live, but we're doing some additional internal pilots," she said. "We're just really beginning to use the tool. We're tweaking everything right now and we don't want to just throw it out there for all meetings." Once fully implemented, DirectMeetings, which is integrated with the travel booking tool, will enable Gray to file a request for proposal, select a meeting site and organize all the details of a meeting.

Meanwhile, Gray has been rewriting Chiron's travel policy, emphasizing the use of the American Express corporate card and the Amex One agency. This time around, Gray has worked more closely with senior management in putting the updated policy together. In addition to the rewrite, the policy also has been reformatted. "We put all the policies upfront and then the procedures as an attachment," Gray said. "That way we can update procedures without updating the actual policy."

Once the policy is completely rewritten, reformatted and Gray has received feedback from managers, she will take a more proactive approach in informing travelers of changes. "We'll do more education than just sending it out."