Dynamic Export » security

10 top tips for business travel

Sally Gordon — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 06:19:43 +0000

Travel is an essential part of an exporter’s business; here are 10 ways in which your business should manage its travel to achieve time and cost savings.

For businesses with a global presence, business travel is essential to growth. Across different parts of the world it facilitates the face-to face interaction needed to pursue new business opportunities, build critical relationships and secure new deals. Corporate travel should therefore be managed like any other controllable expense in your business.

Taking a strategic rather than ad hoc approach where travel and entertainment activity is planned and measured can create significant time and process management efficiencies as well as tangible cost savings. A well-managed travel program will help your business monitor and measure all aspects of your travel from flights to accommodation, car hire, spend reporting, travel patterns and traveller security.

To improve overall business performance, adapt these guidelines to suit the needs of your organisation, and help protect your travellers and your bottom line.

1. Work with one travel manager

For exporters, travel is an essential operational component, so travel management requires specialist expertise from a single travel manager or travel management company (TMC) that understands a business’ unique travel patterns, its needs and cost parameters. By using a dedicated TMC, your business has a single point of contact to take care of all your travel requirements, from bookings to insurance and visas to the negotiation of airfares. A travel manager has fingertip access to a ‘fares dashboard’, which shows the best airfares and hotel rates at the time of booking.

By working with the one travel manager, businesses also have the security of knowing where their people are located at all times through a centralised booking system. There is also greater consistency in your business’ booking processes and travel patterns, which in turn can deliver long-term savings.

2. Create a cost savings travel plan

Ask your TMC to assess how your business spends its travel dollars and then work out a plan to reduce or contain those costs. This plan will help to define the level of service you need from your travel manager, strategies for business travel improvement, travel policy education for your staff, strategies to maximise your spend on air and accommodation and how you can provide traveller security.

3. Develop a travel policy

Put together a program that includes travel guidelines that everyone in the business must abide by, from the top down. The policy will include guidelines for booking accommodation, flights and car hire that will help to drive savings through strategic travel management. Make the policy black and white. This puts the onus on the traveller to think about how they are booking their travel and helps to develop a whole-of-business attitude that’s geared towards cost efficiency.

4. Educate your staff

Communicate the guidelines of your policy to staff clearly. This ensures all of your people know what is expected of them when they’re travelling for business. Staff should know about any changes to the policy and should be able to access the document easily. Your TMC can help you educate your travellers on the best way to achieve cost savings by focusing on ensuring business travellers understand why changes are needed, the benefits of the change and how it impacts them as individuals and as a business.

5. Streamline your air travel

The cost efficiency of your organisation’s air travel can be streamlined using a range of strategies including:

Working with your travel manager to source the lowest logical fares, also known as Best Fare of the Day;
Analysing whether more cost effective classes of travel can be booked, for example Economy class for domestic flights and minimum flight times for Business or First Class;
Businesses can also consider low-cost carriers for short-haul flights;
Ensuring there are ramifications for people in your organisation who make non-compliant bookings.

6. Maximise hotel bookings

Your travel manager should be able to assist you to further leverage your existing hotel program or accommodation processes so you can achieve better savings. You can do this by:

Analysing your accommodation patterns to determine whether there are more cost effective alternatives that are equally convenient;
Identifying preferred hotel suppliers to be included in your travel program;
Negotiating on the total cost of your accommodation by including value-added services specific to your business’ requirements, for example telecommunications, food and beverage, laundry;
Monitoring your organisation’s compliance to your hotel program by identifying leakage and lost opportunities for savings;
Proactively benchmarking your hotel rates against similar sized clients in the market to ensure your rates are competitive relative to current market conditions and renegotiating if the hotel rates are found to be uncompetitive;
Mandating that all business hotel bookings are booked through your travel manager where possible, to give your TMC more negotiating power to secure the lowest rates from suppliers.

SMS safety for business travellers

Adeline Teoh — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 05:05:46 +0000

A new service for business travellers will provide travel and security information to mobile phones to boost safety and save businesses money.

Qantas brand QBT partners and corporate travel agency conTgo have combined to develop QBT Connect, a mobile travel assistant that allows travel managers to contact staff to deliver important information, from itinerary changes to safety updates.

“QBT Connect is a very powerful intelligence service, which will help business travellers during their actual trip by collecting travel related information from many different sources and distributing it to them via SMS,” said QBT general manager David Hughes. “The service is available 24/7 and the information can be customised to suit the needs of our individual corporate customers.”

QBT Connect also includes a tool enabling travel managers to contact all active travellers via their mobile device, to deliver relevant, personalised and timely information, based on the itinerary of the traveller. This includes updates on terrorist activity, airport disruptions and closures, strikes and natural disasters. Travellers can then confirm their location and request assistance if required.

Companies can also use the service to promote preferred suppliers such as taxis and restaurants to comply with their travel policies, and use the system to arrange group transport from the airport to save costs.

Foreign minister visits Korea

Adeline Teoh — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 00:03:19 +0000

Minister for Foreign Affairs Stephen Smith is in Korea today and tomorrow to meet with his Korean counterpart Yu Myung-hwan, Prime Minister Dr Chung Un-chan and other ministers at the Australia-Republic of Korea Foreign Ministers’ Meeting in Seoul.

Top of the agenda will be security, with expectation to build on the Australia-Korea Security Cooperation Initiative launched by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and President Lee Myung-bak in March this year. It will include stabilising the Korean peninsula and denuclearisation.

Smith says he will also “emphasise the importance Australia attaches to concluding a Free Trade Agreement with Korea”.

He added: “Korea is now our third largest goods and services export market. It is Australia’s third-largest source of foreign students and an important tourism market.”

New Australian passport more secure

Adeline Teoh — Fri, 29 May 2009 07:41:24 +0000

Minister for Foreign Affairs Stephen Smith today launched the new N series Australian passport, designed with security features to discourage identity theft and misuse.

Designed and manufactured by Note Printing Australia, the new passport contains the same level of secure features that were used to develop our bank notes.

All the pages in an N series passport are unique, making it difficult to falsify through page substitution or tampering, and with an exclusive tamper-resistant laminate.

The new passport also has a radio frequency chip with active authentication technology, which means authorities can tell they are reading data from a genuine original chip, not a copy. The chip also secures the traveller’s personal details.