Sports travel carries its own sets of challenges and needs
not seen in most corporate travel programs. Former corporate travel buyer Kevin
Maguire has spent the past few years clearing those hurdles as travel manager
for intercollegiate athletics at the University of Texas at Austin—managing
ground transportation and charter air travel, handling group airport check-ins
and contending with inflated hotel rates due to citywide events.
Maguire joined UT's travel team in late 2007 and since has
created "a very consolidated program, very succinct in procedure and
widely accepted by coaches and travelers," he said. The university had a
travel program when Maguire took the position, but athletics was not included
in that, and the department largely acted on its own when it came to travel. Maguire
estimated that cost avoidance is 30 percent to 40 percent higher than when he
first began to roll out the program.
Travel management at UT supports between 600 and 700
travelers spending $10 million to $20 million per year, depending on how well
various teams perform during the respective seasons. Many standard solutions
including online booking tools do not make sense for athletic travel programs,
but the department does use an agency—Anthony Travel, which specializes in
university and sports travel management—for hotel and chauffeured car bookings.
Prior to taking his position at the university, Maguire had
racked up a few decades in the travel industry, including travel manager or
consultant roles at Waste Management, Applied Materials and Tokyo Electron. He
also has served as the Global Business Travel Association's president (followed
by his current term as its vice president) and led the development of GBTA's
sports committee. These experiences have helped Maguire inject procurement
acumen into his university's program, which has become something of a benchmark
not just among college athletics travel programs, but also college and
professional sports programs across the country.
[PROFILE_1]Consolidating Ground,
Charter Air
One of Maguire's recent initiatives was consolidating to a
single sourcing company his department's ground transportation program. He
partnered with technology supplier Go Ground to develop that program from the
ground up, as he found much of the existing technology for managing ground transportation
to be lacking.
"The technology for booking transport was probably
developed in the 1800s, when wagon trains were coming across, and it really
hasn't been improved a whole lot," Maguire quipped.
Through Go Ground, the university now is able not only to
book ground transportation but also to monitor it in real time. The golf coach,
for example, could go into the system and determine exactly where the team's
bus is in relation to its destination as well as its related spending for the
month. Go Ground also is working on mobile technology so those updates can be
accessed via smartphones.
A key driver of the initiative was a lack of pricing
transparency among ground transportation suppliers, Maguire said. Many come
with hidden fees for environmental costs, for example. By consolidating the
program, UT cut ground transportation invoices from about 200 per month to just
one, making cost monitoring simpler. Drivers even are tipped via debit cards,
which brings those tips onto the invoice and eliminates cash expenditures.
Go Ground also handles price negotiations with ground
transportation suppliers, saving the department the time needed to call a dozen
or more vendors to check pricing.
Maguire estimated the program saved about $120,000 just from
the university's summer camps alone. He estimated cost savings from cutting the
paperwork at $250,000.
Safety also was a huge consideration, Maguire said. The
single-source system allows the university to access and monitor suppliers'
safety performance. In fact, the university developed its own criteria for
drivers, safety and maintenance, which Maguire said benefits the university
from a liability perspective.
"The assumption was that when you hired the motor
coach, they had insurance and you were covered, but if there's a greater
liability than what they had from an insurance standpoint, you as a hiring body
can be liable, too, if you cannot show that you did your due diligence on the
company and the drivers," he explained. "We as a university saw red
flags from that."
What began as a University of Texas initiative eventually
resulted in a multiyear agreement between Go Ground and the National Collegiate
Athletic Association. Announced late last year, that agreement makes Go Ground
responsible for ground transportation bookings for the association's various
championships.
"Go Ground demonstrated they had the technology
platform and industry experience to help us accomplish this," according to
a statement from NCAA associate director for travel and insurance Juanita Sheely.
"We want to provide a safer product with good service to our membership
institutions at a better cost."
Maguire's work with the NCAA on the safety side produced
some somewhat startling findings. Out of 1,400 ground transportation companies
that applied for NCAA business, fewer than 100 actually met the safety
requirements, he said.
Maguire, meanwhile, has taken a similar approach with
chartered air travel, consolidating to a single technology tool provided by
Private Jet Services. As with the ground transportation tool, the technology
allows the university to develop safety standards for air charter suppliers and
monitor air charter travel. "You can see the flight crew's history,
manifest information, see what the menu is and get arrival times," Maguire
said. "We're also down from multiple invoices to one."
Maguire estimated the tool will save between $250,000 and
$500,000 annually in charter air costs.
Such technologies are not an exclusive privilege of sports
organizations. While Maguire advanced the selection of these sourcing tools,
they were designed "with the idea that they could use it for anybody,"
he said. "It's just not something anyone had thought of doing." Go
Ground and Private Jet Services have corporate clients, he said.
Managing Travel Amid
Citywide Events
Another of Maguire's projects has been fostering better
relationships between travel procurement professionals and hoteliers for
handling major local events. Business travelers often have had to either
schedule around or absorb heavily inflated hotel rates—sometimes more than
triple the standard rates—when citywide events occur. In Austin, where the
University of Texas buys 1.7 million room nights annually, prices became
especially inflated during such events as the fall Formula One auto racing
event. The situation became so grave that the university considered moving its
home football games outside of the city, Maguire said.
He understands why hotels would want to maximize rates in
times of guaranteed high occupancies. After all, they are following an example
set by many of the organizers of such events. "We're as much at fault to
some degree as the hotels are, because we bring events in and then charge $6
for hot dogs," he said. "It's a free-market system, but it's getting
close to diminishing returns."
That was the message Maguire sought to give hotels:
Short-term inflated rates could provide quick revenues but come at the cost of
losing long-term business.
To take up the matter, Maguire assembled a meeting in Austin
of about 120 travel buyers and suppliers, including hotel general managers and
owners. This evolved into a task force comprised of city officials, event
planners, travel buyers and suppliers across various categories.
The solution proved to be an Olympian task—quite literally.
Maguire and the task force worked from the model hotels are following in London
for this summer's Olympic Games and came up with a basic understanding he could
present to hotels. It entails properties leaving between 10 percent and 20
percent of their rooms available for corporate negotiated rates during major
events, not requiring a minimum-night stay on those rooms and not charging more
than the rack rate for any rooms.
The actual percentages might vary based on the specific
markets they are being used in, but the model was a good starting point to
present to hotels, he said. While this set-up is more of a general agreement
than an official contract, Maguire said virtually every hotel presented with it
saw its merits and better understood how to manage room inventory in those
high-demand situations.
"They're accepting the hypothesis and buying into the
formula," Maguire said. "As we're rolling into our football season,
we already have some hotels who are promising to commit space and keep it at
our rate."
Based on the initial project's success, Maguire next plans
to roll it out as a series of road shows across the country, bringing more
hotels on board with the general understanding.
[PULL_1]Changing Group
Check-In
In commercial air travel, Maguire and the GBTA Sports
Committee were instrumental in helping Delta Air Lines craft check-in
procedures to ease the process for such large groups as college and
professional sports teams.
"You have 50 athletes arriving at the airport at the
same time, and it just slows down the line," he explained. "We asked
if we could do advance check-in [for groups], which they hadn't done in the
past, and whether they could do something with technology to make that easier."
Delta's new process, announced in March, accommodates online
check-in for groups of between six and 40 passengers. A leader can check in the
entire group and its baggage and print out individual boarding passes for each
traveler. The procedure works for both domestic and international flights.
After arriving at the airport, the group leader can drop off
all baggage and pay any additional fees. Checked bag fees were a particular
challenge for college athletics teams, as athletes generally do not carry
credit cards. Were a group leader to stand at the front and pay each bag fee
individually, the card would be shut off after multiple swipes in the same
location.
According to Steve Sear, Delta senior vice president of
global sales, the GBTA Sports Committee "helped improve our appeal"
to large groups, which he said are "key customers" for the carrier.
Maguire said talks are ongoing with other legacy carriers to adopt similar
policies, although the United-Continental merger and American Airlines'
bankruptcy have stalled progress.
The results with Delta represent a success story for the
committee and an example of how industry benchmarking benefits more than just
the participating parties, Maguire said. Members continue to look for other
savings opportunities, including more potential collective buying opportunities
among Big 12 teams.
"We have a conference that brings together pro teams
and amateur groups to talk about concerns and solutions, and that communication
had never been there before," he said. "We now have a committee that
guides some things that are good not only for us but for the whole industry."
This report
originally appeared in the August 2012 issue of Travel Procurement.