Our client provides commercial property insurance and business continuity solutions. The organisation has offices in 20 countries in Europe and Asia – and also Australia and the United States. Its European headquarters are located in the UK, where it has a number of locations.
In January 2013, ATPI Corporate Travel was awarded the travel management contract for the UK business. Three months later the contract was extended to cover Belgium, Germany, Sweden, the Netherlands, Italy, Spain and France.
With offices in so many countries, the firm had previously worked with a number of different travel management companies (TMCs) all over Europe. As a result, there was a lack of consolidated management information (MI) with which to improve travel management efficiency, buying power was not optimised and management of travellers varied by TMC.
The company was drawn to ATPI Corporate Travel’s strong network of European offices, its experience in managing the safety and security of travellers and its unique ability to source global fares.
The Challenge
Although the UK operation was not currently experiencing strong account management from its existing TMC, support for the change to a new, consistent TMC was not universal. Germany, for example, had enjoyed a close partnership with its existing supplier.
As a result relationship building was particularly important both pre and post the implementation phase to ensure maximum joint support and understanding was applied to achieve a new partnership approach to travel management.
The Solution
As soon as the contract was agreed, the ATPI Corporate Travel Global Implementation Team began to develop a structured and consistent process for each country, therefore ensuring a seamless transition to the ‘go live’ date.
This included data gathering – understanding information such as travel policy, profiles, hotel programmes – and, particularly relevant to the firm as an insurance risk specialist, an analysis of the approach to risk in the different countries.
Through a face-to-face consultative approach between key ATPI Corporate Travel and the clients’ counterparts in each country, ATPI Corporate Travel gained an understanding of local markets and strategies. This helped to plan the implementation without imposing identical solutions on each country and ensured the process took into account the varying challenges.
For each new office across Europe, an open day was arranged as an introduction to ATPI Corporate Travel; bookers could meet their travel consultants, Passport & Visa teams and receive a welcome pack which included key contact details and travel booker guides in their local language.
The Result
In a client survey four months after the go live date, 100% of respondents in the eight European countries said implementation was either ‘as expected’ or ‘exceeded expectations’. In the UK, 100% of employees surveyed stated it ‘exceeded expectations’ and all stakeholders agreed that the implementation process had successfully fulfilled the original brief.
In regards to MI, ATPI Corporate Travel provide this monthly, from all eight serviced locations across Europe – this also works in conjunction with the clients’ other TMCs in the US and Canada – in order to consolidate all data and form an accurate global overview.
Complimentary ‘direct access’ training also allows the client full access to retrieve further bespoke reporting tailored to each departmental need as and when required.
Additionally, ATPI Corporate Travel work hand in hand with the clients’ US based preferred risk management company to ensure accurate and clean data hand-off is provided daily on all travellers, locations, modes of transport and up to date traveller contact details.
ATPI Corporate Travel monitors travel policy compliance to ensure restrictions on the number of travellers per flight are recorded pre and post ticketing and appropriate action is taken where required.
ATPI Corporate Travel also receive and manage a weekly global country risk level report identifying countries requiring pre-travel approval to pre-determined medium / high risk destinations.
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