Systematic Redesign for a Remote Work World

Managed travel veteran Tami Pharr stepped into her first role on the buyer side four years ago when she joined Zillow. The company at the time declared itself 100 percent remote—all employees had the autonomy to work and live where they pleased. As a result, the tech-driven real estate marketplace company, once headquartered squarely in Seattle, transformed into what its founder and then-CEO Rich Barton called a “Cloud HQ model” where everyone was connected to one another and collaborated with one another via cloud technology.

The workforce dispersed quickly—across the 50 states and beyond. The company’s travel budget also surged by more than 50 percent once pandemic travel restrictions were cut loose. The surge wasn’t for traditional business trips, though. Instead, it was attached to a new category of travel the company called “zRetreats”—employee gatherings that now number 300 to 400 annually, but began as leaderships’ efforts to keep culture and company connected with real, face-to-face experiences.

“Suddenly, every employee for Zillow had become a business traveler,” said Pharr. “That really changed the calculation of travel for the company.” And because it was remote workers coming back home to the mothership instead of leaving an HQ to travel outward, it changed the requirements of the travel program as well.

Leadership redesigned and retrofitted with audiovisual and other meetings technology all of Zillow’s office real estate in Seattle, San Francisco, Irvine, Mexico City, New York and more recently Denver. In early days for zRetreats, employees continued to book travel in the same ways they had traditionally done: through the Egencia booking tool, which at the time was the main travel tech and service provider for the company.

Zillow more recently changed its primary service provider for transient travel to Australia-based CTM, which has had a fast-growing footprint in both the United States and Europe since acquiring Nebraska-based Travel and Transport in 2021 and UK-based 1000 Mile Travel in 2022. That change, which enabled a more modular approach to travel technology choices, also enabled Pharr to bring a simple meetings technology into the mix—Hubli.

Pharr had realized early on that the new structure for business travel at Zillow was crying out for a hybrid approach to sourcing hotels, which now represented about two-thirds of the company’s annual $40 million in total travel spend. Instead of straight-up transient rates, the company could now also negotiate for room blocks to associate with each zRetreat.

Working with room blocks can be tricky though. “The risk of attrition fees associated with 300 or 400 annual zRetreats is mindblowing,” said Pharr. “We’ve had to get really smart about how source and commit to room blocks, but also how we track against those room blocks.”

The Google Sheet

Working with the Hubli tools was critical for efficient sourcing, said Pharr. “I began doing the sourcing piece, but once I got experienced enough that I could train someone else, we have assigned one person on the planning team who is dedicated to sourcing those 300 or 400 annual retreats.”

Additionally, Pharr and her team have built a “highly sophisticated Google Sheet” that allows them to anticipate how many attendees will stay in the block and for how long. “It gets down into tracking who lives locally and likely won’t need room nights as well as estimates of how many will stay an extra night to extend the trip for personal time or to catch better flights.” As participants book into the room block, the data is shared in the tracker and those who RSVP to a retreat but don’t book a hotel are flagged for follow up.

With all these tools in place, Pharr has driven 100 percent of bookings to room-block identified hotels and has successfully avoided attrition penalties. But she has done far more: She’s realized more than 15 percent savings in hotel room rates by sourcing and filling Zillow’s zRetreat room blocks. This was particularly impactful, she said, when considering the high-price and high-compression cities like New York, San Francisco and Seattle where some of Zillow’s main zRetreat facilities are located.

By working with the zRetreat “gatherings team,” she’s also realized 94 percent adherence to master services agreements that have been loaded into Hubli and has cut the time and resources it takes to source zRetreat hotels by more than 11 percent.

Pharr has also passed on Zillow’s proprietary flight and hotel tracker to Hubli as a template for building more functionality within the tool and that will eventually be a capability passed along to other Hubli clients.

“We have been very transparent,” said Pharr. “We have given them a copy of what we've done, including formulas and everything. Part of my job is to make our partners better because when they’re better, Zillow is better.”

With more automation in place and proof that the new room block-based program is working as intended, the company is expanding the universe of retreats eligible to utilize room blocks—lowering the room night threshold from 125 nights to 75 nights. “That’s just going to mean more possible savings,” said Pharr.