When global director of travel and meeting services Maria
Chevalier joined Hewlett-Packard last year, she surveyed the company's 100,000
travelers to better understand HP's demographics, travel patterns and buying
and compliance behaviors. The results of that survey now are shaping
initiatives and policies and driving additional savings in an already mature
travel program.
Tasked with developing and driving strategy and helping to
create a consulting arm that would enable the various divisions to manage
travel more efficiently, Chevalier discovered that targeting communication and
policy to select traveler groups can effect significant savings.
"Like many other companies with mature travel programs,
to achieve incremental savings requires you to think differently,"
Chevalier said. "We've gotten about as much as you can from leveraging our
contracts, so you have to implement disruptive technologies and approaches in
your program. We're calling this the year of the traveler."
Chevalier found, for example, that Hewlett-Packard's road
warriors—those employees who spend at least 50 percent of their time
traveling—made up a mere 5 percent of HP's travelers but represented just under
one-third of the company's total travel budget. While that group on the whole
fared the best on policy compliance, the survey underscored the need to
identify and correct quickly the road warriors with bad travel behaviors.
"We can tweak [their behavior] and get to them quicker
than the other groups," she said. "If they don't buy correctly, it
can make or break us."
Infrequent travelers—those who travel only one to three
times each year—comprised a much larger group, about 60 percent of HP's
travelers, and they represented about 15 percent of the overall travel budget.
This group also had a high turnover rate and trended younger than other groups,
so the company had to re-evaluate the way it was communicating policy to its Gen-X
and Gen-Y travelers. HP now reaches them through such methods as text messages
prompted by bookings, rather than through a four-page newsletter, the previous
method.
"We're looking at more sound bites, more social
networking, more dynamic messaging and things that are jazzier than what we do
with the other generations," Chevalier said. "Email communications
with four-page letters just aren't driving change."
The survey also examined travel and buying patterns within
different employee tiers. There were compliance issues unique to executives,
for example, because they usually had their administrative assistants book for
them. HP is working to modify the executives' behavior with more information at
the time of booking, as well as gamification methods that pit divisions against
one another to compare which has the best travel behaviors.
Often, compliance issues and other travel program stumbling
blocks in a company boil down to a select group of travelers, Chevalier said.
By breaking down data by travelers' generations, businesses and regions, she
discovered that a glut of compliance problems was coming from younger travelers
within two Hewlett-Packard businesses in two countries.
"Instead of throwing it at everyone and saying, 'stop
it, stop it, stop it,' you're able to go to those two businesses, tell them
they have this demographic issue and give them suggestions on how to fix
it," she said.
Hewlett-Packard has used the intelligence from these
findings to modify its approach to supplier sourcing. Chevalier and her team
matched up the different demographic groups and where they were in their
various loyalty programs and discovered that most road warriors already had
earned the high status levels for which the company had been negotiating.
Additionally, surveying travelers' patterns provided insight
to costs outside of compliance. Chevalier noticed, for instance, that car
rental costs had not increased proportionally with air and hotel costs. By
looking at traveler behavior, Chevalier realized that travelers had migrated to
cabs in response to an HP policy of not reimbursing for GPS devices in rental
cars.
"We're putting all of this together, and it's having us
totally redo our approach in how we procure, how we meet the needs of travelers
and how we address challenges and issues," Chevalier said. "It's
going to enhance travelers' experiences, change buying behaviors and give
understanding back to the businesses."
Originally published in the August 2011 issue of Travel
Procurement.