What is the measure of travel experience?

“It’s not just about cost. Cost is important to our organisation, but we do need to take into account other things,” says Nanette Sorensen, global travel manager of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

That’s not an unusual statement coming from a travel manager. Building, executing and managing a travel programme must balance cost with service, reliability and effectiveness. But the organisation a few years ago created an airline metric to account for that balance and inform how it sources, contracts and manages changes with its preferred carriers. They call it “quality cost per mile.”

That metric includes easily quantifiable data related to airline relationship quality, such as on-time performance, cancellation percentages and baggage-handling performance. But it also includes qualitative elements like how effective a carrier’s sales team and account reps are in providing reporting and responding to needs. How well does an airline handle rebooking in emergency situations? What sort of benefits does it offer travellers?

These relationship pieces are critical to supporting the Church, given its programme mission, unique travel markets and the profile of its travellers. The church claimed more than 62,000 missionaries in 2022 who serve around the world.

“When you have the number of travellers we do, and 80 per cent of them are 18 and 19 years old, they can encounter some problems along the way,” says Sorensen.

To minimise mishaps, the Church focuses its metric on operational excellence, but the qualitative pieces go further to account for those “beyond contract” activities that can make or break the travel experience. “We need an account rep who is very proactive. When you are in a crisis, you really need a partner or a vendor to help you through that,” Sorensen adds.

Unfortunately, the entire airline industry changed at the same time, thanks to Covid-19, sidelining the effectiveness of the quality cost per mile metric, though the Church still had active travellers throughout the pandemic. “[Covid] really disrupted our metric. So for the past couple of years we haven’t paid a lot of attention to it because we were just trying to get our programme moving back to [pre-pandemic] levels,” says Sorensen.

Now that travel levels are back in the programme, the “experience” metric is coming back into play as the Church plans a global air request-for-proposals process this year “to reset everything,” says Sorensen. As before the pandemic, the travel department will use the metric for ongoing supplier management. It also tracks the supporting data for the metric to determine “periodically, if something changed with a particular partner,” leveraging it to offer feedback on account management quality or changes in reliability.

Navigating suppliers’ 'now normal'

In the current travel environment, the quality cost per mile metric may be in for an extensive workout. Air travel disruptions have made headlines over the past year, sometimes the fault of carrier staffing practices and chronic shortages. A series of worker actions and strikes in Europe have affected markets like France, the UK and Germany, with ripple effects extending to other markets. Numerous aviation administrations have leaned on carriers to reduce their flight schedules over certain periods to mitigate the issues.

It’s not just airlines. Worker action and staffing shortages have confounded corporate travellers across the travel ecosystem, including strikes by rail operator staff across many European nations.

Veteran travel buyer Carol McDowell-Schrager, who recently took a new position as global travel manager for T. Rowe Price, says that while she’s not ready to call this situation the “new normal,” travel managers will have to work with suppliers to navigate what she calls the “now normal” in terms of reliability and service, which she predicts will improve over time.

“We need to understand from our suppliers what we can expect, and at that point possibly alter the way our agreements are in place,” she says. For example, on-time performance and cancellations on key routes may affect the ability to shift share to a potential partner. These conversations could be critical, with reliability key to driving traveller experience.

But McDowell-Schrager also underscored the programme allowances companies might need to consider in today’s environment. “There are ways we can shift the programme to make it better for our travellers, but we also have to educate them about these realities and act as an advisor for them,” she says. “If they need to be in place for an important meeting, travelling the day before may now be a necessity, where it may not have been part of the company’s practices or policy before.”

Suzanne Boyan isn’t limiting her conversation to the supplier side. The global meetings and travel manager for management consulting and technology firm ZS actively engages travellers to understand their pain points and get feedback on supplier performance.

“The only way to get to really quantify how happy your travellers are is to engage in conversations with them,” says Boyan. “I don’t want to hear that only from suppliers. It’s not that I don’t trust them to give me feedback; it’s that the people who are the most affected are truly the travellers, and they’re the most important part of my programme.” She parlays the information – both good and bad – into quarterly supplier management discussions.

Nudging travellers towards high performers

Scott Gillespie, founder and CEO of travel consultancy tClara, has done considerable work on traveller experience metrics. He said that while many traveller experience advocates have such metrics as quality cost per mile and use traveller feedback for supplier sourcing and management exercises, there is an argument that such information should be made available to the traveller at the point of booking. “You want your travellers to have visibility of the relevant scores,” he says.

We've seen the managed travel industry get on board with this in recent years. ATPCO's RouteHappy product, which details the seat product (legroom, pitch, electrical outlets, cabin features, etc) has been adopted broadly by US carriers and some online tools bring that content into the booking path.

FlightStats on-time performance data is another "experience" driver that can be made available within booking tools. Bringing that knowledge to the point of sale can impart more trust in the booking tools and nudge travellers toward the most reliable airline for a particular trip. 

Tripbam is third-party technology company that has taken on trust assurance as part of its value proposition. A partnership with hotel guest feedback platform TrustYou allows the hotel reshopping, sourcing and auditing platform to provide summarised review content and what it calls a TrustScore – an independent rating calculated from all verified online reviews worldwide. The system is being used by corporates to assure travellers that when they are requested to switch their originally booked hotel, the new recommendation is a worthy alternative.

On the supplier management side, Tripbam enables travel buyers to set TrustScore thresholds for the properties included in their programmes, communicate with those properties when they fall beneath the threshold and give users the insights to deactivate chronic low-performers.

Benchmarking experience

Perhaps counterintuitively for travel buyers, Gillespie believes experience metrics may be best tracked, managed and communicated by suppliers.

“I’d like to see suppliers get a deeper understanding of how their service offering affects the traveller on more subjective wellbeing dimensions and then report that to the corporate with averages for their travellers and a benchmark for all of their corporate customers,” he says.

He predicted one major supplier this summer will come out with travel friction reporting for their corporate customers, without specifying whether this supplier would be a travel management company, airline or other service provider. Regardless, his view is that such reporting should focus on six “fuzzier” aspects of the travel experience: safety, health, productivity, overall comfort, stress levels and sleep.

Corporate Travel Management has already launched such a benchmarking solution in its local Australia and New Zealand markets. The widget analyses such factors as trip lengths, weekend trips, overnight flights, time zone changes and last-minute travel to determine a wellbeing score for each traveller on a scale of one to 100.

It doesn’t incorporate travel disruption and recovery in that equation; perhaps Gillespie’s predicted evolution of such a tool will dig deeper. “Traveller experience is an issue that’s really important to every supplier, so I’d advocate for keeping it with the supplier,” he says. “It means more surveys, and we’re all survey-fatigued, but it’s so important for the supplier to know and own that data and then be able to impartially report the data to their to their corporate customers.”