Recruitment Company Employs Managed Travel Techniques

CareerBuilder.com in June launched its first managed travel program by implementing a travel management company, a travel policy for its more than 2,500 employees and a preferred supplier program developed from an in-house sourcing effort.

The travel management labors have yielded significant savings for the nascent $12 million travel program. Thus far, the Chicago-based company has achieved savings of 20 percent on average nightly room rates, 15 percent to 20 percent on daily car rental rates and total airfare savings of 2 percent, according to vice president of global corporate finance Bill Razzino.

In addition, CareerBuilder has gone from what Razzino calls "managed chaos" to processing all reservations for its 1,000 traveler profiles through Orbitz for Business, with more than a 90 percent online adoption rate.

CareerBuilder began operations in 1995 and as it grew in employee size, integrated acquisitions and expanded internationally, so did its need for managed corporate travel.

"We noted that you get to be a certain size and you need to start leveraging some economies of scale and managing some of your processes," said Razzino. "We invested a little more in our back office with human resources, finance and operations. There also was a big gaping hole in the area of travel."

Now, Razzino oversees the travel program along with a travel manager and members of the company's finance organization for sourcing initiatives. "We are sort of taking a crawl, walk, run approach," he said. "We weren't even crawling when we implemented this. Now, we are walking and hope to get up to a jog. At some point, we'll probably dedicate more resources to travel and purchasing in general."

With CareerBuilder traveling in unknown territory, Razzino adopted some travel management sourcing processes from his former employer, CareerBuilder part-owner and existing Orbitz client Tribune Co. Razzino also cited his company's e-commerce orientation, travel patterns and workforce demographic with a concentration of a younger sales force and headquarters proximity for the selection of the Chicago-based Orbitz for Business.

Meanwhile, Razzino also set out to obtain negotiated rates with suppliers especially for the company's air program. CareerBuilder handled its own negotiations, but leveraged Orbitz's relationships with the carriers to put CareerBuilder's sourcing team "in front of the right folks."

Without significant spending data, airlines were unwilling to offer long-term discounted deals, but American Airlines offered a six-month trial contract until more information is available through Prism Group. United Airlines has followed suit and offered a contract of similar length.

Although substantial savings have been achieved in just several months, the success did not come without change management.

From a senior management perspective, the choice to formally organize a travel program was a "no-brainer," said Razzino.

The same can't be said for the rest of the travelers. "A lot of folks who have the best interests of the company in mind and are going to challenge whether they are going to get the best prices from Orbitz," he said. "As soon as we said that all of your travel has to be through Orbitz, we expected a big flurry of challenges on a trip-by-trip basis."

Razzino was prescient. To quell pushback, he employed a communications strategy that included training sessions and e-mails "outlining the win-win for the company and the employees" from an efficiency and cost perspective by "getting them one portal to say, this is where everybody has to go and it's a requirement, and this is our platform that we are using. There you'll find all the vendors with which we've negotiated preferred rates so you can get the best price and so we can monitor your behavior to use that data to make sure we negotiate the best price."