Why should SMBs hire a Travel Manager?
The Travel Manager has never been such a common profile in a company. When you start searching for them on Linkedin, they often appear under the title of “procurement manager”, “travel arranger” or “travel analyst”. Despite of these differences, what really have in common these professionals are a series of tasks and responsibilities which concern the area of operations management, procurement and audit:
- They control over the company’s travel expenses.
- Their priority is reducing costs working to leverage expenditures to the company’s advantage.
- They are able to estimate costs and margins.
- They analyse data and prepare expenses and trends reports.
- They spend a lot of time negotiating preferred rates with travel suppliers such as hotels, air carriers, car rental companies and other travel service providers.
- They try to guarantee travelers’ alignment with the company’s travel policies and rules.
- They’re responsible for the implementation of the security and risk management policies of the company.
- They pay great attention to every new technology which could improve the management and reduce travel expenses.
Even if the Travel Manager operates more within an hybrid sphere involving operations, financial and purchase management responsibilities, she could fulfill also secondary tasks, working together with social responsibility consultants, risk managers and event planners. For example, a company with a strong commitment in reducing the carbon dioxide emissions will work hard in adopting more eco-friendly travel practices, like choosing only green accommodations or renting electrical cars instead of the traditional ones.
So, why it’s so important to hire a travel manager even if your organization doesn’t spend millions of dollars per year in travel services?
- It means more time for your employees (and their assistants!), increasing the productivity and satisfaction before, during and after their trips.
- Your company will benefit of a better control over the bookings and the travel costs.
- Your employees’ trips will be always in line with the company travel spending, preventing no authorised expenses.
- You’ll have a professional expert in charge of the policy communication, which could make more efficient the mechanism of booking approval.
- In case of abroad trips, the Travel Manager will be a trustful responsible for the security of the travelers and will held also a key-role in managing any critical situation dealing with bureaucracy or insurance matters.
If you plan to hire a new talent for your company after reading this post, we’re going to share with you some skills you should pay attention to:
- Great knowledge of the travel industry: main global suppliers, key-local suppliers (B2B) and price policies.
- Knowledge of the main travel management softwares available in the market.
- Experience in the logistics of national and international trips.
- Networking and communication skills.
- Customer service orientation.
- Proactivism and problem-solving orientation.
- An International certification from an accredited organization of business and corporate travel will be a plus, like the GBTA for example.
What’s the ROI of hiring a Travel Manager?
If you’re willing to spend between 120 to 150,000 USD per year for a new talent acquisition, you should know in advance how much money you’ll be able to save hiring a professional in charge of your business travel management and organization. Supposing that your spending is around 500,000 USD annually and your travel manager is able to reduce your costs of 20% during the first year, you won’t have a significant ROI since your investment is higher than the effective saving in travel operations. What if your travel spending is higher? In USA 40% of midsized businesses spend between 500k to 5M in travel per year. This is definitely the segment that could benefit more of hiring a Travel Manager.
I am co-founder at LastRoom, a travel startup based in Mexico City. LastRoom helps companies and business travelers cut their travel expenses with the first cloud-based software tailored to SMBs, combining the best hotel content available on the Internet with high levels of corporate control, such as invoices’ reconciliation, reports and analytics tools.
