Gray Dawes Travel

COMPANY PROFILE

Key staff 

Suzanne Horner, chief executive officer
David Bishop, chief operating officer
Richard Allardice, chief finance officer
Sophie Taylor, chief technology officer
Warren Dix, chief commercial officer
Ian Currington, director of account management

Main industry sectors

Chemical industries, construction, education, engineering, financial and professional services, healthcare and pharmaceutical, information technology, manufacturing, media and entertainment, oil and gas, retail, sport, textiles, utilities

Services in addition to business travel

Consultancy, group travel, incentives, leisure travel, meetings and events, passport and visa services, sustainability programmes, traveller wellbeing services, venue sourcing, VIP travel

Type of company

Private limited company, family owned by Inchcape Family Estates

Awards and accreditations

• ISO27001
• UKAS Management Systems 0026

Online transactions

60%

Transactions

Air 33% | Hotel 35% | Rail 27% | Car 2% | MICE 2% | Other 1%

Trips

Short-haul 68% | Long-haul 32%

Top destinations

Short-haul: Amsterdam, Madrid, Munich, Milan, Frankfurt
Long-haul: New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston, Singapore

Office locations

Colchester, London, Manchester, Leamington Spa, Leeds, Edinburgh, New York, Sydney, Brisbane, Melbourne

Association and network membership

Advantage Travel Partnership, The BTA, GBTA

Full-time equivalent staff

216

Average length of service (years)

8

Average industry experience (years)

18

ESG/CSR/DEI policies

• Aligned with the following UN Sustainable Development Goals: 4: Quality Education, 5: Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls, 8: Promote inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all, 10: Reduce inequality within and among countries, 13: Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts 
• Gray Dawes is a female-led organisation, with 67% of the workforce female, and a 50/50 male/female split across the senior team. In the midst of building out a wider DE&I policy, covering data capture, data mapping and strategic partnerships

GDS

Travelport

Online booking tools

Atriis, SAP Concur

Expense management tools

Certify, Chrome River, SAP Concur

Other technology (I=in-house, T=third-party)

Air reshopping T 
Auditing I 
Business intelligence T
Data visualisation T 
Disruption management T 
Hotel reshopping T 
Meetings management T
Mobile booking app T 
Mobile itinerary app T
Peer benchmarking T 
Personalised trip recommendation T 
Pre-trip approval T 
Profile management I
Quality assurance I 
Sustainability reporting T 
Traveller tracking T 
Travel risk management T 
Unused ticket management I 

Other technology 

YourTrip+ AI booking recommendations engine powered by Grapevine, YourHub proprietary invoice storage and itinerary management tool

Technology strategy 

Gray Dawes has positioned itself using cloud solutions to ensure that it can harness current and future technology. This supports a global workforce, as well as ensuring security for both employees and customers. The company uses the most value-add third party software where appropriate, but also retains an in-house development team

NDC content

Online booking tool YourTrip (powered by Atriis) delivers content from NDC, the web, supplier direct and GDS 

Biggest innovation of 2022 

Gray Dawes has developed a 'retailing strategy' for how it offers business travel to clients, using the Yourtrip platform. This uses artificial intelligence along with the company’s messaging platform to deliver a single interface for clients across all booking channels, increase spend visibility and control, allow total trip cost management and reduce time to book and ensures that changes/cancellations cover all products booked from multiple suppliers on the platform