Enhanced service provision for the travel arranger community.
Helping a leading UK building society meet their organisational objectives while enhancing experiences of VIPs and VIP travel arrangers through our Premium Services expertise.
Savings made
£1.2M
Percentage of online bookings
+85%
Objectives.
Our customer made the move from its previous travel provider as they wanted to reduce costs and empower its employees to make their own bookings using our online system. The building society also had to be confident that our technology could effectively apply its travel policy.
We wanted an agency to help us migrate our bookings online to achieve service fee savings, as well as have a strong account team that can manage effective travel programmes and policies across our entire travel and events spend and negotiate the best deals on our behalf. We didn’t want to compromise and Agiito provides specialist expertise across each travel category.
Head of Sourcing,
Leading UK building society
Solution.
To achieve our customer’s objectives, we set out to move 80% of their travel bookings online within nine months of implementing our services and technology, ensuring that the level of change was sustainable.
Results.
We provided enhanced service provision for the travel arranger community. Within the first month of the implementation, our customer went from just 3% of bookings made online, to over 80%. That level has since increased to 85%+, with complex travel arrangements supported by our offline experts. This aligned with our customer’s multi-hierarchical travel policy.
Over £1.2M was saved within the first nine months through a combination of expert programme negotiations, greater compliance and online transaction fee savings.
What next?
We understood that cost reduction was a big focus for the building society and that any changes would also need to improve the traveller and booker experiences. So, since the online and savings initiatives we’ve been looking at the processes that our customer’s Personal and Executive Assistants have been using. We knew straight away that we had the ability to improve their experiences, whilst also saving them time.
It became clear that multiple PAs were booking executives onto the same trip, but with varying times and costs, resulting in a much longer process. PAs were co-ordinating among themselves to ensure the right executives were on the correct flights, cross referencing airport to hotel transfers, and sometimes redoing it all after a date change.
So, without further ado, we introduced Nationwide to our Premium Services team! The idea was for this specialist team to assist their PAs with bespoke, detailed itineraries, and to manage the entire booking process and workflow on behalf of their executives.
Our team travelled to our customer’s offices, meeting the PAs to start relationship building and to completely understand the internal challenges that these travel arrangers face. They then devised a bespoke process, presented back to the PA community, gaining their approval and buy-in.
This new process meant the PA had to simply make a phone call to their designated contact within our team and provide the details for the booking and who required travel. The team then take it from there, booking all aspects of travel, arranging seat assignments bespoke to each traveller’s wishes, booking airport transfers, and booking ‘favourite’ rooms in frequented hotels.
But it doesn’t stop there… our Premium Services team also arrange everything from private after work dinners to online check-in and use their expert knowledge to make recommendations on where to eat and relax. They’re a real extension of our customer’s community.
In situations where employees accompany VIPs, the team align these bookings with the appropriate expenses policy. Within the first month of introducing the building society to this specialist service, we received countless positive feedback from PAs commending us on how it’s made their lives much easier.