Sierra Leone's Ebola-plagued capital, Freetown, is 3,000 miles from London and 3,600 from Cape Town, yet it is the latter city, not the closer-by U.K. capital, that has been feeling the effects of the outbreak despite having not a single confirmed case.
"Ebola has had a massive impact on travel to the entire continent of Africa, even though South Africa is farther away from the outbreak than London is," said Chris Pouney, director of business travel for U.K.-based Severnside Consulting and author of Understanding Business Travel in Sub-Saharan Africa 2014. The figures back him up. Africa was the only region worldwide where airlines carried less traffic in November 2014 than November 2013—down 2.5 percent, according to the International Air Transport Association.
The punishment the whole of African aviation has taken for Ebola neatly epitomizes outsiders' attitudes toward managing travel in the region. The first, "a constant theme," said Pouney, is that "the whole of Africa is tarred with one brush." Felicity Meyer, travel manager for South African-based retail and wholesale group Massmart, agreed. "This is not the United States of Africa," she said. "Each country is unique in terms of travel experience and safety."
The second lesson is that perception and reality about Africa can be very different, especially for American and European global travel managers who never have visited their offices in the region. Both Pouney and Meyer, for example, questioned a response in BTN's survey of U.S.-based global travel managers, in which 33 percent said they have consolidated with their global travel management company in Africa and the Middle East, and another 8 percent said they have consolidated regionally.
Meyer contended that some travel managers who believe they are using their global TMC in Africa would find the truth somewhat different. "It would be interesting to ask the same question of those companies' people on the ground in Africa," she said. "The big TMCs position themselves as global with an ability to reach anywhere in the world, but the reality is different. The reality is that locally their offices are using local agents."
To understand why, Meyer pointed to another finding in the BTN survey to which she attaches much more credibility: Forty-two percent of respondents cited security and safety issues as their biggest challenge in the region. In North America and Europe, the overwhelming strategic priority for travel managers may be cost control, but in Africa ensuring traveler safety trumps all other considerations, and local offices regard highly trusted, locally based travel agents as their first line of defense.
Moving away from such agents to global TMCs "needs to be approached carefully," said Meyer. "You can't march in here in your size 10 boots. I have at times underestimated the relationship between arrangers and their local providers who turn somersaults for them. You tread on these relationships like you would on a Mozambique spitting cobra. Local agents protect their travelers from outside predators."
Yet, paramount as security is, the mismatch between perception and reality means global travel managers also can be guilty of overprotecting travelers. Pouney recounted meeting an Angolan hotel's general manager, who told him four business guests staying for one week each prove much more lucrative for his property than one of those guests staying for a month. "The manager told me that when the guests arrive, they have their security briefing ringing in their ears and don't venture outside the hotel to eat or drink," he said. "But after a week they get bored with being in the hotel and start wandering out, when they discover it was significantly safer than they were led to believe."
Instead, said Pouney, while issues like Ebola and terrorism certainly need to be managed, more mundane safety concerns often are the greatest risks. He pointed to Nigeria's appalling road safety record, as there are 1,000 deaths per 100,000 cars on the road there, compared with only 7 per 100,000 in the United Kingdom. "You can worry about the big stuff, but if you're not using a car company with working seat belts, it could be a much greater risk," he said.
Finding the right balance between too much and too little intervention is a recurrent dilemma. Monique Swart, founder of the African Business Travel Association, also highlighted it in her foreword to Understanding Business Travel in Sub-Saharan Africa. "Due to myriad complexities and challenges, companies have either been unwilling or unable to tackle business travel management in this region in a strategic way," she wrote. "This has led to often poor governance, minimal control measures and low visibility, and too frequently a lack of priority given to how corporate travel programmes operate on the ground in Africa.
"Local offices and travel partners often find themselves facing two types of challenges. They are either left in isolation to deal with the arduous task of managing a corporate travel policy with minimal input or interest from their global teams. Or, conversely, they are instructed to mandate a global policy locally, by a head office which has little to no understanding about the region—often trying to copy/paste unrealistic policies and approaches. Companies must respect that although the way things are done in more developed markets might often be advanced in comparison to many African markets, going into Africa with a 'we'll show you how to do it' attitude is a surefire way to total failure," Swart wrote.
Yet if all of this makes the first option outlined by Swart—leaving Africa to its own devices—appear the more attractive one, that may increasingly prove an unsustainable approach as well. Ebola notwithstanding, significantly more travel managers in the BTN survey (22 percent) expect their travel to the region in 2015 to rise from 2014 levels than those who think it will fall (7 percent). And while that first number is relatively small, Africa is tipped to be one of the hottest regions for economic growth during the next decade or so. "Spend on travel for Africa is minuscule in contrast to the United States in global budgets, but it also has the greatest growth potential," said Meyer.
When travel managers decide to grasp the African nettle, they do indeed find the challenges more severe than in more-established regions. A survey of 72 buyers conducted for Understanding Business Travel in Sub-Saharan Africa found that only 47 percent are able to produce automated traveler-tracking reports, while 58 percent are not receiving data for their African offices. Even when they do get it, 32 percent consider the data poor.
The main problem is that much of the infrastructure associated with travel management in developed markets simply isn't there. Ian Epps, director of partnership relations for the global TMC consortium International Travel Partnership, pointed out that 25 of Africa's 55 countries and territories do not participate in IATA's Billing and Settlement Plan, the basic building block of airline/TMC accounting. "There is plenty of desire to improve quality levels and learn but the infrastructure is less sophisticated," said Epps.
Almost every other aspect of travel management is similarly challenged. Payment card acceptance is limited outside South Africa and, in some countries, said Epps, tickets have to be paid for in hard currency.
Obtaining data also is a major problem. Another reason Meyer is skeptical about the value of multinational TMCs in Africa is that almost all their offices in the region are partners and franchisees. "They have different mid- and back-office formats," she said. "The technology is not unified, though the TMCs tell us it is." Pouney agreed that "managing a standard TMC across the region is probably not the answer" and that it is instead "worth looking at a data warehouse" to make the best possible job of cleaning and integrating data from disparate sources.
Africa experts warned that companies can't adopt a "one-size-fits-all" approach to their internal processes either. "A travel policy that works across Europe does not mean it will work across Africa," said Meyer. "It may not be practical." Meyer cited the example of a global policy in which use of business class is determined by length of flight. In Europe or North America the perks of business class, such as separate check-in and priority boarding (and therefore disembarkation) might be an agreeable luxury, but on some African routes they could save many hours of discomfort and inconvenience, and prove the difference between a trip that is viable and one that is not.
Yet again, perception and reality about policy implementation are often very different. "Even if you think your policy is globally aligned, that won't be the case on the ground," said Pouney. "Local offices may well disagree with the hotels selected at the global level, which are often very expensive, and sometimes the most secure hotel in town is not the glitziest."
Airline sourcing has its challenges too. Pouney's report characterizes flying in the region as expensive, with poor route networks, capacity, service and safety. Epps cautioned travel managers to ensure travelers do not fly airlines on the European Union's blacklist, if only because they are not covered on most insurance policies. Nor is it just the aircraft that are hazardous—so too are supplier relations. "In some African countries, airlines offer lower fares behind your back, and personal incentives still go on," Epps said.
Despite these many challenges, companies undoubtedly can achieve marked improvements in their travel management in Africa, both in terms of traveler care and cost control. However, given that conditions are so markedly different than North Africa or Europe, they need to be researched properly. Consequently, the key message from Africa experts to travel managers is that they must do what their own travelers increasingly are doing: Visit the region. "Travel managers need to increase their knowledge of Africa and build credibility with business heads," Pouney wrote in Understanding Business Travel in Sub-Saharan Africa. "The best way to do this is to travel [here] themselves, which they rarely do."
This report originally appeared in the Feb. 2, 2015, edition of Business Travel News.