What gets measured gets improved and perhaps no one can testify to that fact better than your company's travel manager. Gaining visibility into a company's travel spend can bring a host of previously unseen (and often unsightly) travel spend details into the light and drive new policies to better manage the travel spend.

And one of the fastest and most effective ways to gain visibility into your travel spend is to bring it online. With that in mind, Purchasing recently tapped the expertise of the travel managers at two consultant-dominated firms to discuss their experiences in bringing the travel spend online.

Karen Servatius worked at a travel agency for 13 years before taking a job as travel and events manager at the U.S. operation of Logicalis. At the time she joined the company, it was a busy 100-person IT consulting firm and she booked travel for most of the company's well-traveled U.S. employees through an offline travel agency. But by the time the company grew to its current level of 700 employees plus a bevy of outside contractors working on and traveling to various projects, Servatius could not manage the booking responsibilities alone, much less track and manage the company's overall travel spend.

“Depending on what phase a project is in, we have sales teams, technical teams or services delivery teams traveling to customer sites and other locations,” she says. “And it's not just in the major market cities, which was making it difficult to plan our travel and negotiate volume-based discounts because we didn't know where our employees were traveling.”

Moving to an online travel booking tool would kill two birds with one stone: it would allow Logicalis travelers to book their own trips inside predetermined limits and produce more visibility and reporting which Servatius would be freed-up to leverage.

But which tool would best suit the needs of a busy IT consulting firm? Servatius spent the better part of a year reviewing the online travel tools in the market and realized the most important feature to Logicalis was the reporting capability—she wanted to be able to run various reports to track user travel-spend closely and identify possible savings opportunities. And closely behind that priority was the user adoption aspect—implementing a tool that wasn't user-friendly or was viewed as “foreign” would make her job more difficult and make the implementation less effective.

“Our employees are very online savvy and they can find good fares on their own on the Internet, so we also wanted to use a tool they were familiar with in their personal travel,” she says.

With those two priorities to guide her decision, Servatius landed on Expedia Corporate Travel as her tool of choice. Expedia provided Logicalis with a detailed rollout strategy complete with posters and materials to get travelers introduced to the idea of online booking early on. The early challenge—even before making the tool live—was getting travelers to fill out their online profiles in the tool, which would help automate their booking later. “I knew if I could get them to fill out their profiles, half the battle was won, so we focused on that prior to the rollout,” Servatius says.

To encourage employees to take that step, Servatius held a raffle. The first 200 employees that completed their traveler profile in the Expedia system would be entered in a raffle to win two first-class airline tickets. And it worked.

“I had 200 people done in 90 minutes,” Servatius says. “Those two tickets were a huge incentive.” Today, there are 400 Logicalis users booking their own flights, hotels and rental cars on the Expedia tool. To drive compliance, bookings made outside the company's travel policies are clearly flagged in the tool and the user is notified that their manager will receive a copy of that plan.

But the major goal of the move online—improved spend visibility and reporting—is what Servatius sees as the major cost-based benefit. Each month, Servatius runs a report of a division's travel spend and reviews the data with the division's manager, primarily looking for missed savings opportunities.

“Each division needs a different report with different slices of the data, and in the Expedia tool, I can provide that for them,” she says. “Instead of being bogged down in making reservations and searching for lower cost flights, I can sit face to face with people and educate them on how to better manage their travel.”

To that end, one of the features that Servatius likes best about the Expedia tool is the ability to add a new field on the fly. For example, if one division wants to track its travel spend by project number, a field can be added, while if another prefers to see the data by employee number, that is available.

“Our CFO is extremely happy with these new reporting capabilities,” she says. “We don't have to ask someone else to do it—we make the updates immediately.”

The next move for Servatius is to introduce the new capabilities to her travel management peers in the company's overseas offices (Logicalis is headquartered in London and its parent company is based in South Africa).

Growing pains can be an effective change driver. For many years, IEM, a Baton Rouge, La.-based disaster preparedness and homeland security consulting firm, used a small, local travel agent to book employee travel. Administrative/travel coordinators would either e-mail or call the travel agent in Utah and book the trips and then would have to follow up with any changes or cancellations.

“But our travel spend was increasing every year to the point where I knew we had to get a better handle on it, especially with the increased competition in the travel market,” says IEM's travel manager Linda Bailey. “I knew there was a chance to reduce our travel costs, even though much of our travel is billable to our customers, and I knew using an online tool would help.”

Bailey has the benefit of a purchasing background and put those skills to work in “going out to bid” for an online travel provider. The first priority for an online tool: It had to provide immediate savings. The ROI had to be there or the move would not even be considered by upper management.

But flexibility was also a major priority in Bailey's analysis. An online travel system had to provide IEM's travel coordinators with a host of options and handle the majority of the company's changes and transactions online.

“Our employees often have changes in their travel based on how the project goes,” Bailey says. “Sometimes they have to stay longer or come back earlier to go to another location and that's where an online tool could really streamline things. It's my job to make sure no one winds up sleeping in the airport.”

And lastly, the tool had to provide detailed reporting and actionable spend data to allow a deeper analysis for cost savings going forward.

With those priorities in mind, Bailey reviewed a variety of online tools and found the American Express Axiom online portal met all her requirements. Bailey used IEM's historical travel data to test out Axiom's savings potential and immediately there was a potential savings of more than $25,000 identified. Going forward, she tracked average ticket price as a benchmark of savings: using the Axiom tool, IEM's average ticket price dropped 8% in 2007, a year where most rates increased due to higher fuel costs.

The flexibility benefits of booking online were proven when Bailey received a call at home on a weekend from three of the company's directors stuck in the Atlanta airport. “They were told by an airline agent that there were no flights for two days and there were no hotel rooms anywhere in Atlanta,” Bailey recalls. “So they called me at home. I got on the Axiom tool from my home computer and got them three hotel rooms and direct flights for the next morning in 10 minutes. They were ecstatic. It makes me look like a genius but most importantly it makes our company more efficient when hundreds of other people were stuck in that airport.”

Bailey says IEM has eight travel coordinators that are using the tool now and has asked American Express to flag any airfare that is more than $200 above the lowest fare.

And the reporting capabilities of Axiom have already proven their worth and exceeded Bailey's expectations. There is a standard set of reports produced and a menu of more than 75 custom reports that can be gathered as well. For example, Axiom produces an availability report that identifies unused airline tickets.

“I've been told that on average a company can lose 3% of its total air-travel spend on unused tickets which expire,” Bailey says. “This report tells us what will expire and when while the exchange report tells us how those tickets are used.”

While IEM does not have many preferred travel service providers right now, the ones it does have are loaded directly into the Axiom tool.

“The rates and contracts that American Express has negotiated and reside in Axiom are better than ours in most cases,” Bailey says.

In addition to the ROI calculation, Bailey says there is no shortage of of anecdotal evidence to show the new tool is well received. From travelers offering to take their travel coordinators to lunch to the company recognizing Bailey with an award in 2007 for her work in improving the travel process at IEM, much of which she says is the result of putting the travel spend online.

“It's so much easier to manage the travel for IEM now that it's running well and I can communicate that to the rest of the management team and know they feel the same way,” Bailey says.