Profiles InTravel Management: State Farm

Dealing W/ Disaster Duties In The Field

Company: State Farm Insurance Cos.

Headquarters: Bloomington, Ill.

2002 U.S. booked air volume: $17 million



As corporate responsibilities for many travel managers shift, none has taken on duties that so closely resemble those of a storm chaser as Melinda Samp, State Farm Insurance Cos. business travel center supervisor.

"If it's a tornado, earthquake or hurricane, I'm sent out to take care of the housing and rental cars for the employees," Samp said. "Our job is to take care of them so they can take care of the policy holders." However, Samp tempers her potentially adventurous workload: "We obviously wait until things settle down, so nobody's in danger," she said.

While managing State Farm's catastrophe duties are relatively new to Samp, her other travel management responsibilities fall in line with more traditional roles. When she's not negotiating, Samp is educating travelers on policies, encouraging responsible traveler behavior and garnering booking tool adoption, which can be as daunting as any tropical storm. Yet, Samp's recently acquired duties have been a natural progression for the travel manager. "It's a good fit in terms of travel because I'm already working with the rental cars and hotel properties," she said.

As one of the nation's largest insurance companies, State Farm has big business in catastrophic weather and natural disasters, so when bad weather sets in, so do its employees. "I'll actually be deployed to set up all the rental cars and hotels or apartments for the claims employees and catastrophe employees," she said. "They can be out there anywhere from a couple of weeks to a year."

Migrating from Sabre BTS to its latest GetThere platform has not been without its woes (BTN, Aug. 11). While BTS never had much penetration at State Farm, Samp—who rolled out the latest GetThere release this summer—is beginning to introduce the new tool to travelers.

"We have 13 zones within State Farm," she said. "We have selected three zones to do a strong pilot, in which we're going to set up trip modeling and send them weekly travel hints, targeting specific information. For example, our Texas group uses Southwest Airlines, so we're going to target trip modeling on Southwest for them through the tool."

Once the tool is readily used by travelers in the first three zones, Samp will move gradually to the rest, until the entire organization is up and running. "We're trying to make it user friendly for our travelers," she said. "The adoption's only probably about 2 percent, and it is rolled out nationwide to all of our travelers but we haven't marketed it. Any of our travelers who have a profile could access it, but right now we're just trying to educate them on the tool and give them information to help push adoption."

Educating travelers has been a cornerstone of Samp's travel program. From booking tool adoption to curbing those small expenses that can add up to lost money, Samp has focused on communicating expectations to travelers. Fees imposed for not refueling rental cars, not booking hotel rooms through the proper channels and changing booked airline tickets have been reduced dramatically in recent years—cutting costly traveler behavior without a mandate. "I request car rental reports on 'offenders,' as we call them, who have turned in a vehicle three times or more that hasn't been refueled," Samp said.

According to Avis, one of State Farm's preferred car vendors, on average 55 percent to 60 percent of travelers do not refuel cars before returning them to the vendor. Samp has driven down that percentage within her own organization to stand consistently at about 20 percent, with a goal to reach 15 percent through traveler education rather than a mandate.

Operating as a rent a plate, Samp's team at State Farm was booking only air and car reservations for employees. However, State Farm regional operation centers negotiated with and booked local hotels for all of the company's travelers nationwide. "It used to be State Farm's culture that we would book the air and car. When you went to visit an operation center, it was kind of like going to visit a friend," they actually booked the hotels for travelers, she said.

Although the operation centers still have autonomy in hotel negotiations, Samp has spurred travelers to make all hotel bookings through the rent a plate. "There are many reasons that we're starting to work more closely with those operation centers. They negotiate those hotels and load them into the GDS, and now we're booking them. We have all the information captured in one reservation." This has helped with traveler security, as well as negotiations. "It's been very useful as we're pushing adoption on that side to know where our travelers are located," Samp said. "It's also helping us tremendously from a revenue standpoint in terms of the commissions that we're receiving. We're also capturing all this information, and we can give it back to those operation centers so they can negotiate much stronger contracts."

Samp also cut down significantly the cases of travelers making changes to airline reservations. Armed with the belief that travelers want to make decisions that benefit the company, Samp has harnessed the power of simple communication to achieve savings by making travelers aware of their behavior's impact on company costs.

"That was a huge endeavor for us. In 2001, we had close to 16,000 changes," Samp said. "We educated people on the cost of making changes to airline tickets. In 2002, we cut that number to 8,000. Travelers were unaware of the costs to the company not only in the $100 fee but also the add collect. It's about explaining the industry standards to management."