Is That Business Trip Justified? A 7-question Checklist

I’ve yet to see a credible and scalable approach to estimating a business trip’s return on investment (ROI). So how do we know if a business trip should be taken?

Seems it’s always been a matter of judgment, a subjective call made with (usually) the best of intentions. Some trips are clearly justified; others are cloudier.

Today, it’s more important than ever to get these travel decisions right. We’re looking at tighter travel budgets, more acceptance of the virtual meeting, and greater concerns about the climate. We’re also keen to build the trust and relationship equity that’s deteriorated over the last two and a half years.

Here are seven questions to judge the merits of taking most any business trip. Answer any question with a “No” means you should skip the trip. Give each a “Yes”, and off you go with a clear conscience and a clearly justified trip.

1. Is it clearly better to do this trip’s mission in person than by a virtual meeting?
2. Are this trip’s risks to the traveler’s health, safety, and well-being acceptable to them and their employer?
3. Will this trip’s impact on the climate be sufficiently mitigated?
4. Will this trip’s success clearly help achieve an important goal?
5. Will the traveler have one clearly value-adding role on this trip?
6. Have specific goals or success criteria been established for this trip?
7. Does the traveler expect to get a reasonably good return on the trip’s cost and their time?

Sure, your list of questions may be different, but it should cover all the issues raised above – the benefits of meeting in person, health and safety considerations, climate impact, criteria for success, and the prospect of a good ROI – even if we can’t measure it.

Join the discussion about this checklist here on LinkedIn, or drop some comments below.

Correction to yesterday’s post

The link to register for “How We Meet Matters”, tClara’s white paper on the merits of virtual and in-person meetings, was wrong.

The correct link to register for this paper is https://www.tclara.com/register-for-hwmm1

White paper: “How We Meet Matters”

So many questions and so many answers about virtual versus in-person meetings.

“How We Meet Matters” cover page and contents

This 38-page white paper digs into big issues. How important is meeting in person to culture, teamwork, morale, and attrition risk? What’s the best-for-your-job mix of in-office and remote work? Do business leaders want to travel more or less? What’s the sustainability priority in their view?

And plenty more. With insights from 522 business leaders on how to decide which way to meet (hint: think about “meeting friction”, and three other factors.)

You’ll find new frameworks for managing travel and meetings much more strategically. (See this quick 10-question test of any company’s travel strategy, and Trip Tester, our new tool for ensuring travel is justified.)

You can register here for your free copy. If you like the paper, please share the registration link rather than the paper. You’ll make the sponsors happy. A big thank you to CWT, Cytric by Amadeus, and Delta Air Lines for supporting this high-quality research on these very timely topics.

How Good Is Your Travel Strategy?

You probably don’t know because your company doesn’t have one. Let’s fix that.

Companies are stuck managing travel in a tactical way. They focus on cost savings, duty of care, and traveler satisfaction. Fine and good in a pre-pandemic world. But not so good going forward.

Why? Because business travel is being reshaped by powerful forces. Its impact is being questioned; its risks have increased; its substitute, the virtual meeting, has gained a ton of advocates; its carbon emissions are growing increasingly unattractive.

No surprise that travel budgets are shrinking. Business travel is becoming a scarce resource. But because it is a vital ingredient for commercial success, it now needs to be managed strategically.

Goals Drive Strategy – So What Are The Goals?

Strategy 101 says that a strategy must be shaped by the desired goals. So let’s start by asking what the goals are in today’s modern travel program. Here’s a list of goals most companies might choose from, in no particular order:

• Better recruiting and retention of road warriors
• Better traveler health, safety, and wellbeing
• Lower travel costs / bigger savings
• Justified travel
• Lower travel-related carbon emissions
• More successful trips
• Higher compliance to T&E policies
• Higher levels of traveler satisfaction

Your list may look a bit different; fine. Take your list and go ask the travel budget owners (not the finance folks; not the procurement folks; not the HR and Risk folks) how they would have you prioritize the goals.

Remind them that if they prioritize everything, they prioritize nothing. Get them to either force-rank these goals, or choose their top two or three.

If they choose “Lower costs / bigger savings” as a high-priority goal, and they choose one or more of the traveler-centric goals, e.g., better traveler health, safety, and wellbeing, explain that those are conflicting goals. They’ll need to be really clear about their priorities.

Great Start – Now What?

Take a bow if you’ve been able to get a consensus about your travel program’s prioritized goals. It could not have been easy, but wow, is it a valuable accomplishment.

Now that you know the travel program’s prioritized goals, you’ll want to start building the supporting strategy. Start with a hard look at your travel policies, especially those that affect traveler friction. These include the cabin policy, the hotel quality, type of allowable ground transportation, requirements for extra connections (for lowest logical fares), etc.

If the top goals include more successful trips or any of the traveler-centric goals, you’ll want travel policies that minimize traveler friction. Yes, these trips will be more expensive, but that’s a cost of pursuing those goals.

There is a lot more work to be done to build up a strategically valuable travel program – more on this later. Meanwhile, here is a 10-question test that shows the other elements that go into a strong travel strategy.

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Justifiable Travel Made Easy

It’s hard to imagine a strategically valuable travel program that doesn’t advocate for justifiable travel. tClara is introducing Trip Tester, a travel justification tool, at the GBTA Convention on November 17th. Stop by Booth #1916 for a demo, or ping me at scott@tclara.com for a demo.

About Google Flight’s New CO2 Display

Google Flights now displays a carbon emission (CO2) estimate for most flights.

Folks, this is a game changer because it brings flight-related emissions data to the shopping table on a scale that reaches millions of flight shoppers.

Google Flight display for Seattle to London, one way on Nov.1st 2021

Not only is Google Flight’s CO2 data credible and easy to understand, it is easy to see which flight is better or worse, and by how much. This has big implications, namely:

• Leisure and unmanaged business travelers will become accustomed to seeing this data. Many will use it to select their flights, making CO2 data part of the “consumer experience”.
• Business travelers who shop first on Google Flights before booking in the OBT/TMC channel will get used to seeing this data. Many will use it to select their flights.
• Travel managers will be expected by travelers and their executives to provide booking tools that provide flight-specific CO2 data.
  • This will create a standards problem, unless the booking tools use the same CO2 model as does Google Flights. More on this below.
• Airlines will feel pressure to improve their CO2 metrics as they appear in Google Flights, especially if Google is successful at making its CO2 model a free resource to others, as it says it plans to do.
• Unfortunately, it will reinforce the belief that premium seats, e.g., business class, should be allocated more CO2 per passenger than economy seats. This belief is wrong, and leads to more flight emissions, not less.

Insights About Google Flight’s CO2 model

Google’s CO2 model calculations are based on the European Environmental Agency (EEA) framework 3.1a, published in 2019, and some of its related data sources, including the BADA flight emissions model, which may use 2016 aircraft and engine data. The EEA framework is described here. Google apparently uses the Tier 3A approach, described on page 25. Google also uses data from other sources, including those from airlines and other sources to obtain the aircraft models and seating configurations.

Some things that caught my eye about Google’s approach:

More connections don’t necessarily mean more emissions. Note in the exhibit above that a 2-stop flight (circled in blue) has less emissions than the one-stop flight below it.

There seems to be no adjustment made for a flight’s passenger load factor or cargo weight, nor for the actual in-flight routing or actual gate-to-gate time. Factoring in these variables would make the model more accurate, IF the model was given each flight’s actual data. This data is practically impossible to get pre-flight. Other flight CO2 models may include these variables by making good-faith estimates, but they are still estimates, and probably a good example of providing false precision. Google’s approach is good enough.

That said, Google uses a traditional method for allocating more CO2 to premium economy, business and first class seats, based on the square footage of these types of seats. I’ll take another tilt at the windmill by saying again this is fundamentally wrong, and harmful to the climate.

Moving on. A flight’s emissions are shown as better or worse based on the other flights’ emissions for the same O&D, the same route, and the same cabin, and the same day(s) of travel. If a flight’s emissions are within 5%, plus or minus, of the median emission value, it is marked as “average”. Users can sort the itineraries based on CO2, so it makes it easy to pick the least-emitting flight.

Google says it plans to make its model available to the travel industry for free via the Travelyst coalition. It would be even better if Google published an API tomorrow to let anyone consume their calculations. The quicker the travel industry coalesces around flight and hotel CO2 calculation methods, the better. Until then, expect travelers to be confused about seeing significantly different emission estimates for the same flight. Confusion leads quickly to distrust, which is not what we want on this issue.

Innovation Opportunities

A few quick thoughts on how this platform could be put to even better use:

• Change the basis of allocating CO2 from the seat’s size, to the amount of CO2 emitted for the weight of the seat, its passenger and the passenger’s luggage, per square foot.
• Publish an API so anyone could consume these calculations (as mentioned above).
• Integrate this CO2 data into your corporate booking tool.
• Use the API and your TMC’s historical booking data for your program to set a 2019 baseline of flight emissions. Better, have the bright folks at Thrust Carbon or eco.mio do the heavy lifting, and enable ways to make offsetting easy and ethical.
• Update the analytical modeling to use more current data on engine emissions.
• For those concerned about the accuracy of the CO2 estimates, lobby for the airlines to publish for every flight the
  • Amount of fuel consumed;
  • Cargo weight;
  • Passenger and baggage weight;
  • Passenger load factor (wishful thinking).

Flight emissions will only grow in importance. It’s good to see Google enabling better decisions on this front.

Why We Need To Fly Business Class

If your company is committed to reducing its airline-related carbon emissions, you need to start by re-thinking your cabin policy. This is the single-most important factor in a travel program’s impact on travel-related emissions.

It turns out that flying business class is better for the climate than flying economy class. Hard to believe, right? I was guilty of promoting the business-class is-bad belief back in 2007 when I led the development of TRX’s groundbreaking airline carbon emissions model. Chalk it up to some lazy thinking on my part, and please accept my apologies.

I make the new case why we need to fly business class in this Op-Ed at Business Travel News: https://www.businesstravelnews.com/Management/Why-We-Need-to-Fly-Business-Class

Yes, the optics of adopting a business class cabin policy will be tough to overcome, but if your company is serious about reducing its airline-related emissions, it is the right way to go. Comments welcome here and on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6830486638385233920/

5 Barriers to Business Travel’s Recovery

It’s worth thinking about what’s going to stand in the way of demand for business trips. Yes, the Covid problem is a huge barrier, but it goes beyond that. I see five related barriers that our industry will have to reckon with. Here’s the short story on my LinkedIn page: https://bit.ly/5_Barriers_to_Business_Travel New connections are welcomed.

The longer, richer read follows. Fair warning – it is a sobering assessment.

1. Virtual Work

The more that work gets done virtually, the more that virtual meetings will eliminate demand for business travel. Pre-Covid, virtual meetings were a known alternative to traveling, but a clear downgrade in terms of interpersonal impact and, frankly for some, status. Many travelers and their managers were quick to decide “It’s better if we do this meeting in person.”

Post-Covid, managers up and down the ranks are forced to use virtual collaboration tools, like ’em or not. Guess what? They work. For a lot of meetings, across a lot of use cases, and for an awful lot of people. Today, managers are building up a comfort level with virtual work, and that means trouble for travel.

If employees don’t have to go to an office to get their work done, why would they need to travel to get their work done?

Fresh Signs of Travel’s Recovery

No doubt you’re searching for credible signs of the travel industry’s recovery.  Well, you’ll want to bookmark this site, BCG’s TRIP, with a bunch of gold stars.

Use this no-cost site to gain clickable global, regional and country-level insights about:

• Consumer sentiment and intent to travel
• Recent trends in travel searches and ticketing
• Forward travel build-ups based on searches and tickets
• Covid case and death rate trends by country/region
• Country-to-country travel dependencies and current search/travel indicators
• Government restrictions and economic indicators

* The Travel Recovery Insights Portal (yes, TRIP) is designed and produced by BCG in collaboration with ARC and 3Victors. TRIP will be updated weekly with fresh data. For those not familiar with these firms, ARC is the airlines’ clearinghouse for tickets sold by U.S. travel agencies; BCG is a leading global management consulting firm, and 3Victors is a big data company specializing in GDS searches and airfares.

This site is a classic example of key industry players working together for the common good.  This complimentary site will be available indefinitely – likely until the shape and pace of the travel industry’s recovery becomes much more clear.

Δ Innovation kudos for:

• Displaying GDS search data – talk about a leading indicator!
• Including nights away as a metric – very helpful for the hospitality crowd
• Country-level travel partners – quick way to gauge international travel recovery prospects

If you like TRIP ‘s information, but want more detailed data or passenger demand estimates for major markets, please contact

TravelRecoveryInsights@bcg.com

New Chapter, New Focus

It’s a tough time to say goodbye to all the great folks at ARC.  May 15th will be my last day there.

Like so many other fine firms, ARC is facing the pressures of the travel industry’s epic downturn. A special thanks to Mike Premo, Lauri Reishus, Dickie Oliver, Tom Casalino, Eric Barger, Doug Mangold,  Arun Gupta, Chuck Thackston, Ben Kean, Noah Robins, Vanny Zhang, Kristen Ebersole, Chuck Fischer, Shelly Younger, Sarah Boyd, Steve Solomon, Peter Abzug, Peter Kane, Megan Leader, John Pittman, Dan Swain, Heather Unger, Tanya Nass, Sofi Momen, Sohum Karia, Paul Barber, Brian Coleman and Rich Licato for your leadership, collegiality, insights and commitment to serving ARC’s customers. I am very grateful for the time I spent working with so many good people, and surely wish all of you well in your efforts to re-position ARC for the years ahead.

So what’s next?  It’s hard to imagine a bigger question than the one surrounding the travel industry’s recovery. There will be massive changes ahead, and that means plenty of opportunities for innovation.

This blog will focus  initially on the innovations and adaptations meant to bring about the travel industry’s recovery.  I’m curious to see what comes to market, and impatient to see what works.  If you’d like to share something along these lines, I’ll be at scott@tclara.com

NB: This blog’s title had been Gillespie’s Guide to Travel + Procurement. This blog has all of the prior posts, but the page menu has changed to reflect the new focus.

Lower Costs and Successful Trips Matter Most

“Which of these four travel-related goals is most important to your senior management?”

The answer?  Lower travel costs is the most important goal, while more successful trips came in a very close second, according to the survey tClara just ran.

If you group the three non-cost goals into something like “Travel Impact Goals”, you see that this group gets a total of 58% of the top goal choices.  So while lower costs may have squeaked out a first-place finish, I’d say that cost takes a back seat to business impact.

I’ll go further by wondering how many travel buyers really, truly know their senior management’s top travel-related goal.