As Corporate Travel Managers and Procurement and Sourcing professionals, you face myriad challenges when securing lodging for your travelers and teams in need of global extended lodging and those challenges may include: duty of care compliance, cost management, time-consuming search/booking processes, traveler satisfaction, and so on.
Are hotels your only option? Are your travelers booking rooms in strangers’ homes halfway around the world via home-sourcing websites?
A better solution awaits you.
Professionally managed and serviced apartments exist around the world and they are great options in both quality and corporate compliance.
Maybe you have a project team going to three cities in Asia over two months to on-board a new client. Or maybe it’s a regular rotation of trainees coming to company headquarters.
How about VIPs who would prefer an apartment near a regional headquarters location versus a hotel?
Where do you begin? Do you have the same level of clarity and control in extended global lodging as in other parts of your travel program?
Most would answer, “Not really, no.”
“If a lodging request is too long for Transient and too short for Relocation, it falls into a black hole. No one wants to touch it.”
-F100 Travel Manager, 2015 GBTA Convention
1. Duty of Care. Are You Doing All You Can to Mitgate Risk?
Travel managers frequently report that their travelers are “doing their own thing” when it comes to project-based trips and longer stays.
If your travelers are booking AirbnbTM or their own “outside the program” hotels for a two week trip to India, China, Turkey, Germany or Mexico, how does that sit with your CRO or Risk Team?
Corporate serviced apartments are professionally managed short-term lease apartments and to comfortably into a business travel and duty of care program. GBTA’s Risk Committee published a report, including a checklist of benchmark items necessary to achieve optimal duty of care compliance.
The committee wrote:
“Have a good communication plan set up for your travelers. Keep it simple and clear, so should a trip go awry, they know who to call for what.”
Without crucial tracking data and real in-trip traveler support to solve real problems, your travelers are at unnecessary risk.
2. Cost. Extended Stay Negotiated Rates Save You Money.
Bjorn Hansen, Ph.D. of NYU School of Professional Studies published a report, stating that corporate contract rates will see an increase in 2016. The increase could be the largest since 1987
“I have no visibility into what my project teams are doing. I know they’re booking on their own and the requests aren’t coming to me. We don’t know how much is being spent on project team lodging.”
-F500 Travel Manager, 2015 GBTA Convention
That’s bad news for corporate transient lodging; i.e., a typical hotel stay of ~1"6 nights.
It’s far worse, however, for extended lodging, especially for US-based international travelers. At best, extended stay brands aren’t as prevalent in other countries and at worst, hotels can be extremely expensive from the room rates to food and beverage.
And some booking portals don’t even allow for >30 day bookings. A call to the property is the only option to negotiate a better- extended stay rate.
Consumer home-sharing is a possibility, but see Duty of Care. What, then, are your options? You can (and maybe do) spend hours on the phone, negotiating rates with hotels. And you can do your best to source non-GDS serviced apartments in global markets. But who has time to tackle all those challenges, including language, time zones, cultural differences and so many more?
Think about finding a partner to manage this sector for you.
3. It’s Easier Than You Think if You Find the Right Service Partner
“What’s your minimum stay requirement?”
At GBTA Convention 2015, and in a November 2015 WWStay-sponsored GBTA Foundation survey, one of the most commonly observed obstacles to travelers or travel managers booking international serviced apartments (or even hotels) is managing minimum stay requirements.
Natural extensions of that challenge are lease negotiations and payment. Who has time to negotiate a lease for an apartment in Paris, or Gdansk or Singapore? And what if (as is often the case) the property doesn’t accept a credit card form of payment and you have to manage a deposit and bank transfer via your Finance department?
Overall, the process is a major pain in the neck. It’s no wonder this sector of travel often falls into a black hole between the Travel and Relocation/Mobility departments.
Find a service partner to handle all the legwork for you. Services like WWStay focus solely on this unique and demanding channel and can remove many of the hassles you’re encountering today.
4. Simplifying Search, Aggregation and Curation. Serviced Apartments Are Out There; You’re Just Not Seeing Them
Because short-term serviced/furnished apartments aren’t generally listed in the GDSs, TMCs and Travel Managers rarely know of their existence.
Further, with no GDS booking capability and no connectivity to the standard back or front office solutions, how does a Travel Manger or TMC accurately report on travel spend, much less practice good Duty of Care?
Many international serviced apartment providers don’t have the technology to connect to the GDS, else you’d see them today.
Work with a partner who can access thousands of serviced apartments you won’t necessarily kind in your travel booking platform.
5. Travelers Love Serviced Apartments. And Who Wouldn’t?
You’re going to Manchester, England or Hong Kong, China with four colleagues for a 45-day project.
Would you rather stay:
A. In a hotel room with a bed, bathroom and perhaps a continental breakfast downstairs, or
B. Be in furnished apartment with all the appointments and space, perhaps including grocery
In GBTA Foundation’s Extended Stay survey, travelers offered as their top reasons for extended stay accommodations:
- Fully equipped kitchen
- Preference for the residential feel
- More square feet
- Amenities
- Feeling of safety
- Location (access to worksite,
Of course, no single lodging solution is best for everyone. Offering serviced apartments to your travelers, however, gives them a choice they heretofore may not have been aware of…or may have been booking on their own unbeknownst to the travel department.
6. Job Security. A New Opportunity to Add Value
Savvy people seek out opportunities to add value in their roles.
Taking control of project-related and extended stay lodging travel is an opportunity to do just that.
Today extended lodging often falls into an unmanaged, fuzzy area, between Corporate Travel (focusing on transient lodging) and Relocation (focusing on long-term temporary duty assignments). delivery, breakfast, and shuttle service to the worksite? (social activities, etc.)
Does your corporation know how much is spent on extended/project-based lodging and is that data timely and accessible?
Are your travelers being offered a wide range of global extended stay options, or are they bailing out and booking on their own? According to GBTA, 60% of travelers are doing exactly that. TMCs are not generally experts in this particular lodging channel, and often choose not to get involved. And if they do, it can be an unfavorable cost-to-beneTit balance for the corporate travel manager.
These efforts are considered high-touch and priced accordingly in a TMC’s fee structure. Travel, procurement and sourcing managers have an opportunity to lean in and bring order to chaos via better process, reporting, duty of care, service delivery, cost reduction and traveler satisfaction.
Conclusion
Extended stay business lodging, often applicable to project teams, individuals/VIPs, trainees, employees traveling in groups, etc., is perhaps one of the Tinal frontiers of managed business travel.
Many travel and procurement departments have little to no visibility into their travelers’ behaviors or spend, meaning that travelers are at greater risk, and corporations are at a loss to effectively measure and manage this significant expenditure.
At WWStay, we answer all the aforementioned challenges and opportunities. We aggregate and curate serviced apartments and branded extended stay hotels, provide spend data and traveler support/tracking. In short, we do all the work for you…all at no charge.
To explore ideas about improving your global extended stay lodging program with WWStay, reach out to: Rich Markus, VP Business Development | E: rich.markus@wwstay.com | B: +1 415.795.8050
Rich brings over 20 years of business travel, sales and content/digital marketing experience to WWStay. A big fan of SaaS platform solutions, Rich is passionate about improving processes and generally helping people shine in their jobs. His other passions include elder care, books vs. video (GoT or Wolf Hall anyone?), cooking and just-for-fun golf.
Original article
