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Travel-smart tips for businesses
By Jay
MacDonald • Bankrate.com
If you travel for business, you've
already heard the news: The party's over.
The freewheeling, globetrotting days of first-class,
dot-com-style business travel have given way to a new era of parsimonious
belt tightening as companies large and small batten down their travel
budgets and prepare to ride out economic rough weather.
A National
Business Travel Association study indicates that more than two-thirds
of U.S. companies already have slashed their travel budgets this
year. Most are doing so reluctantly. After all, face time and pressing
the flesh are still the time-honored preludes to closing the deal.
No business whose bottom line depends on road sales,
remote customer support or multiple site management can afford to
completely eliminate travel or even curtail it for long. And with
the talent wars in full swing, you dare not cut back too much on
the frills for fear of losing your top road warriors to the competition.
What's a company to do? Well, to paraphrase a corporate
catch phrase, it's time to travel smarter, not harder.
New travel realities
Traditionally, when the economy heads south, industries that depend
heavily on business travel, such as airlines and hotel chains, cut
their rates to keep their seats and beds full.
That isn't happening this time, and here's why: the
NBTA recently predicted that revenue from domestic business travel,
currently $185 billion annually, will double in five years. As a
result, the airlines aren't easing their first-class and business
fares for fear they won't be able to notch them back up when the
worst of the slump is over. Those high-priced business travel seats
keep the airlines aloft and defray the cost of cheap seats for the
leisure travelers.
Hotel chains, especially the high-priced spreads,
are holding firm on room rates for the same reason.
Think of it as a high-stakes game of chicken between
corporations that increasingly feel gouged by air carriers and resort
chains, and a beleaguered travel industry that's betting that no
one is willing to book their CEO into a Howard Johnson.
10 tips for thrifty business
travelers
But you can trim travel costs without sacrificing too much of your
firm's prestige or your employees' expectations.
Business travel industry analyst Christopher McGinnis,
director of Atlanta-based Travel
Skills Group and author of The
Unofficial Business Traveler's Pocket Guide, offers 10 tips
to either directly save money or get more value for your dollar
by traveling smarter.
1. Ask for hotel perks.
"Instead of looking for a lower rate, ask for things that
a hotel could add on to make your stay a better value: breakfast
at a corporate rate, free shoe shines, free newspapers, free parking
(especially at downtown hotels where you could be charged up to
$20 a night to park your car)," McGinnis suggests.
2. Use the hotel's airport shuttle.
"If you don't use the shuttle and the shuttle's available,
it's built into your rate anyway, so you're paying for it and
not using it," he says.
3. Ride the rail. Instead of renting
a car, take advantage of the rapid rail links that a lot of major
cities, including St. Louis, Chicago, Atlanta, Washington, D.C.,
Philadelphia and Cleveland, now have from the airport to the central
city and the suburbs. "In Atlanta, you can take MARTA right
from the airport for $1.75," McGinnis notes, "verses
a cab for $25."
4. Don't rent autos off site. "It
can be cheaper to rent away from the airport, but the second-tier
car companies don't have as many shuttles as the big guys do so
you spend a lot of time waiting for shuttles," he says.
5. Stay over a weekend. Since it
costs more to fly midweek, staying over a Saturday night saves
on air fare. "Obviously you don't want to sacrifice the happiness
and well being of your employee to do it," says McGinnis,
"but for those employees who welcome it, it's a savings."
6. Stay in the 'burbs. "At
major downtown hotels, you're paying for that convention hall
and sports stadium even if you're not using it," he says.
Instead, McGinnis recommends hotels in suburban areas, which are
typically newer, nicer, cleaner and more likely to have a good
business center and Internet connection. "They'll probably
be cheaper, too."
7. Avoid airline hubs. It's almost
always cheaper to fly into an outlying airport. "For instance,
in Los Angeles, it's very expensive to fly into LAX and much less
expensive to fly into Burbank or Ontario or Orange County,"
notes McGinnis.
8. Buy online. If you are based
in a big city and you mostly fly to other big cities, you probably
don't need a travel agent. "It's very easy to make those
types of reservations online and you usually get a percentage
off to do so," says McGinnis.
9. Use a fee-based agent. "If
you fly internationally or have complex reservations, it's certainly
worth it to use a fee-based travel agent," he says. "Many
travel agencies now charge a fee, maybe $20, for that, but if
an executive billing at $200-$300 an hour is spending an hour
putting an itinerary together, you're losing money."
10. Share the miles. "When
you earn enough miles for a free ticket, you can have that ticket
issued to anyone," McGinnis says. "If you have a small
company and everybody's part owner and you want to pool your miles
like that, you could, in effect, use your miles to pay for somebody
else in the company to fly somewhere."
"The easiest way to save money is to not travel,
but not everybody has that luxury," McGinnis says. "If
you're belt-tightening, you can combine trips or have people stay
at one location for a longer period instead of making two
or three trips back and forth."
Better yet, go virtual
Thanks to technology, there is another enticing alternative to the
hassles and expense of business travel these days: go virtual.
Many companies that previously had little choice but
to take their dog-and-pony show on the road now find they can significantly
slash their travel and entertainment costs by holding Web seminars
("Webinars"), online interactive sales or training meetings
conducted in real time via the Internet. There are dozens of vendors
on the Internet.
Mike Holmes, CEO of Cincinnati-based Easymail
Interactive, helps companies beat the bushes for virtual prospects
through opt-in e-mail programs announcing their Webinars.
The recent Comair airline pilots strike, notes Holmes,
increased interest in Webinars as a cost-cutting measure. "We've
seen a lot of companies just grow exponentially by driving traffic
into a Webinar and letting businesses conduct business where they
want to, on their own time, and promote their products in a much
more efficient manner," he says.
One billings/customer-care client estimates it saved
more than $43,000 in travel expenses by using a Webinar driven by
Easymail's permission-based marketing.
The traditional meet-and-greet model that drives business
travel is changing, says Holmes.
"A relationship always helps, but in business
today, people don't have time to spend with vendors," he says.
"They may give you more consideration if they can access your
pitch when it has their complete attention.
"It's hard enough to sell when you're under the
stress of getting there at the right time and then worrying about
closing the deal. This is just an efficient means of allowing a
company to sit in its own office and not have the expenses of travel
and flight."
Jay MacDonald is a contributing
editor based in Florida.
-- Posted: July 27, 2001
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