Company: Kaspersky

Industry: Cybersecurity

Kaspersky, a global cybersecurity company, struggled with consistent definition and enforcement of its corporate travel policies. The Egencia travel management platform and online resource center enabled Kaspersky to gain increased global and regional policy compliance as well as better communication and consistency in its travel program.

Kaspersky is one of the world’s pre-eminent cybersecurity companies and its travel managers oversee a corporate travel program of significant scope. The international company has more than 30 offices globally and supports more than 400 million users with 270,000 corporate clients.

Managing a global ecosystem of this scale means that many Kaspersky employees are frequently traveling internationally. This includes people from the company’s Moscow headquarters who need to go to North and South America, Africa, Asia, and Europe. Employees at numerous local offices must also travel regionally and internationally to support the company’s far-flung operations.

Challenge: Achieving consistency in policy compliance

Kaspersky’s corporate travel program is based on two levels of policy. Global policy affects everyone in the company and sets the maximum limits for travel, accommodation, and per diems. It defines what’s reimbursed and what isn’t, who can and can’t book business class airfares, and so forth.

The second level of travel policy focuses on regional or local policies that are defined for specific regions and countries. These policies reflect regional nuances and specifics and take into consideration cultural differences in various parts of the world. Local policies also include local legal and financial compliance. The local travel policies can be seen as more rigid than the global policy since none of those policies can conflict with the global policy. For example, if the global policy states that something isn’t allowed, then the local policy can’t allow it either.

“One of our main motivations for this dual global/local approach is to create a fair environment, where everyone feels as if they are being treated the same way,” Irina Kostyukova, head of business travel at Kaspersky said.

“We also want to keep compliance high, which is only realistic if policies are flexible to address local needs. If we didn’t have a global policy, local policies could go separate ways — it would be chaos. On the other hand, if we had just a global one, we could not cover all the specific local requirements. From my perspective, a multinational company needs both types of policies.”

The challenge Kaspersky faced was one of consistency in policy definition and enforcement. Kostyukova’s goal was for the travel policies to be clear, realistic, and simple to follow. All employees of a multinational company should (in an ideal situation) get the same experience and level of service when it comes to business travel. But this wasn’t easily accomplished when the company first set out to implement its travel policies. Compliance was an issue, which became a source of frustration for Kostyukova.

“If two employees from different countries are checking into a hotel and see that their stays are booked at different rates, this can cause all sorts of problems from a policy compliance perspective,” she said.

“Similarly, if one of them can pay for their stay using a corporate card while the second one has to pay with his personal credit card, you will have trouble. The second traveler might just avoid booking the corporate rate next time.”

The issue of consistency comprised a number of related challenges. One problematic area for Kaspersky was travel-related communication and education. The company’s employees often didn’t know the details of policies or had forgotten them. Maintaining a consistent travel policy also relies on good relationships with travel managers in the other regions.

“It is very important, nearly imperative, to keep open, full communication with travel managers in different regions,” Kostyukova said. “This ensures that we are all working together to provide the safest and the best quality service for our travelers. We have to discuss different new ideas and the ways to handle problematic situations.”

Solution: Increased compliance with clear communication of travel policies

To achieve travel policy consistency — along with the business outcomes provided by such consistency — Kaspersky built an intranet portal that contained its global travel policy information so that travelers could find the information they needed to stay complaint. When it came to building a robust international travel program, Kaspersky was able to use our platform to implement the specifics they needed in their travel policy to meet their needs on a global and regional basis.

The Kaspersky travel program now enables its employees to book travel and easily stay in policy. It’s able to answer virtually all travel-related questions. If a traveler doesn’t know how to book a trip, or a part of a trip, the internal knowledge base gives them the answers they need.

The platform is tuned for local travel. For instance, based on Kaspersky’s requirements, travelers in a particular region see specific hotel chains or regional air carriers available for their trips. There’s also global transparency — using the intranet portal a traveler from one country can see how it works in another — and that “creates a sense of community,” Kostyukova said.

Results

Now, Kaspersky travelers have the same booking experience wherever they’re located, regardless of destination. “This is important, not just for the booking experience, it’s important for the whole travel experience,” Kostyukova said. 

Our platform has delivered a number of additional benefits to Kaspersky. These include more combined air and hotel approval requests, which reflects an increase in compliance as more travelers are booking hotels according to global and local policies.

The platform has also enabled Kostyukova’s team to consolidate travel vendors. “When it comes to our business travel program, minimalism is the key,” she said. “We should have as few service providers as possible, for air, hotels, taxi, payment solutions, and so forth.”

This makes it possible for the company to get the best rates and keep things simple and consistent for their travelers. It’s also easier to establish standard levels of service across the world and troubleshoot issues if they arise.

Data is a common thread across the Kaspersky platform experience. “I’m fan of data,” Kostyukova said. “I love to work with it. I love seeing how figures can show what is happening, where we are going, what the trends are. I use it to generate different types of reports like compliance reports, global travel reviews, and more. This data is a great support for me.”

Working with Egencia, Kaspersky has been able to develop and implement a travel program that addresses its need for policy consistency.

Company: James Fisher Marine Services Ltd.

Industry: Marine engineering

Employees: 600+

James Fisher Marine Services Ltd. (JFMS), part of the UK’s leading marine services provider James Fisher and Sons plc, provides a variety of technical and operational services to energy industries worldwide. Responsible for a vast offshore industry, the company delivers turnkey solutions for the maintenance of oil rigs, wind turbines, wind farms, vessels, and more.

JFMS employs approximately 200 people across numerous sites in the UK and more than 400 sub-contractors and required a business travel program that could meet their needs.

The challenge

Providing support for the offshore industry requires different areas of expertise, as every situation is unique. Expert divers may be called in to fix a vessel for example, while highly skilled engineers may be urgently needed on oil rigs. Like many companies in this type of service industry, JFMS doesn’t employ individuals with project-specific expertise on a full-time basis as the need for their involvement is often sporadic. Instead, sub-contractors play an essential role, with more than 400 of them working for the company at any given time.

Within JFMS, there’s a dedicated projects delivery team with multiple responsibilities, including all of the company’s logistics and business travel. This also includes 24/7 operational support to assist with active offshore projects.

The project services team faced various challenges and issues with their business travel. Lisa Murphy, who leads the business operations team at JFMS, made it her priority to find a solution to tackle ongoing business travel hurdles.

The unique requirements of JFMS meant Murphy needed to find a travel management company (TMC) that was responsive, informative, and efficient in order to cope with the business’ operational and logistical demands.

“The company we previously used for travel management was not responsive enough to meet the complex demands we face within the marine industry,” Murphy said. “One of the key selling points of Egencia was the self-booking function, meaning individuals have the ability to view their own journey planner and cancel bookings with the click of a button, which is often necessary because of the urgency and flexibility required for many of our projects.”

Picking up speed with Egencia

By using managed business travel with Egencia, the project services team was able to react to travel requests with confidence, knowing they could meet the demands within the restricted timeframes they often faced.

“Before moving to Egencia, previous business travel companies struggled to accommodate our needs,” Murphy said. “To put this into perspective, we’re frequently required to coordinate the travel of 20-plus engineers, technicians, and divers, including flights, cars, hotels, luggage, and other requirements like oversized luggage for things like diving equipment. And all of this often happens at short notice, and with location-specific restrictions.”

These problems were solved with the features of Egencia’s single digital travel platform, which added speed and efficiency to the team’s booking capabilities and removed a lot of the burden around administrating travel.

The platform features, which include bulk data management, guest profiles, lodge card, and more, have simplified the booking and managing experience for travelers and travel managers. With bulk data management, travel managers can create and update multiple traveler profiles at one time. Guest profiles made managing contractors’ travel easier — as short-term employees, travel managers weren’t required to create full profiles to book their travel.

The platform also supports the project services team with its reporting functionality. Reports on all travel activity are easy to access, and data visualization makes it easier to look at spend and travel trends to identify how their travel program is performing.

“Our Egencia account manager is great,” Murphy said. “She’s used the reporting to demonstrate compliance patterns for traveler groups and highlighted pain points, like noncompliance and late booking that we can completely eliminate.”

Reporting is also used to track down employees and contractors by their scheduled itineraries, which helps Murphy’s team log in and assist travelers as needed.

“The nature of our job means that we’re on call to assist our workforce, including our travelers,” Murphy said. “Naturally, there are immediate and unexpected situations in the industries we service, and it was important that JFMS found a company that operated 24/7 to assist with the around-the-clock requirements of our team.”

“With the Egencia platform, we can log in and find traveler information straightaway and even make amendments on the go from wherever we are.”

Simplifying finances in a multifaceted workforce

The project services team are able to set policy limits in the business travel platform and adjust accordingly based on whether the traveler is an employee or contractor.

“Sub-contractors don’t have the same privileges as normal policy allows, so it’s great that we can customize this and set limits for them in the guest profiles on the Egencia platform,” Murphy said.

“They also prefer not to give credit cards when booking or staying anywhere, so we use the lodge card to pay for everything. We prepay and invoice in one go, so there are no fiddly expenses.”

This simple and effective solution makes life easier for the project services team and promotes traveler satisfaction with employees and contractors. Travelers aren’t having to track back their expenses or wait for payments.

The lodge card means that Murphy’s team doesn’t have to collect expense reports from contractors and can instead manage all expenses in the platform through the lodge card. By keeping costs under one umbrella in the platform, the project team has been able to ensure a vast, complex travel spend is centralized, which simplifies tracking.

Finding savings

By using Egencia Analytics Studio, the project services team has visibility into their travel spend for the first time. This has helped the business identify savings opportunities, as well as demonstrate its cost management to key stakeholders.

“Spend is changeable as it depends on projects,” Murphy said. “The fact that everything goes through one route and is not fragmented simplifies reporting and cost-saving initiatives.”

The business controls costs by giving booking control to a select number of people on the project team. These team members oversee the management of travel for employees and sub-contractors on the road.

Travelers can log in to the platform and choose their options before a member of the project services team approves and completes the booking. And while this process is relatively unique to JFMS, the functionality of our platform means that any business can implement the platform’s features to fit their specific processes and needs.

The extensive content available on the platform also helps to play a role in controlling costs.

“We have made savings on travel by booking hotels with Egencia’s [preferred] rates,” Murphy said. This is a massive benefit for a company like JFMS, who has a large number of staff and contractors traveling often, at the same time, and often with little advance notice. They can benefit from potentially lower room rates without worrying about booking in advance.

Customer service that’s always there to help

Customer service is a big deal to JFMS’ travelers. The needs and requirements involved in their trips can be unique and demanding, and it’s crucial that expert help can be secured quickly, easily, and often urgently.

“Customer service are very helpful with extra baggage. We need to take large equipment on some trips, so it’s really helpful to have customer service there on the phone to help sort it all out,” Murphy said.

The project services team have been able to fully support employees since moving to managed business travel with Egencia. We provide support 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year in multiple local languages, with more than 80 percent of calls being picked up in the first 20 seconds.

The Egencia solution

The JFMS team has found numerous advantages in moving from their previous TMC to Egencia.

“The team found the implementation process to be easy and well-supported,” Murphy said. Highlighting the comprehensive account management support and regular technology updates that consistently improve the business travel experience at JFMS. By partnering with Egencia, JFMS has also been able to focus on cutting costs and promoting agility by taking advantage of our travel technology and always-on customer service.

Traveler satisfaction and ease-of-use have been key to promoting the travel program and encouraging compliance; the company has achieved a 95 percent online adoption rate.

“The visibility into travel options is good, and it’s easy to use. The fact that we can book hotels and transport in one booking is important to us too — it makes sense, so people want to use it,” Murphy explained. “I only hear about something if there’s a problem, so for me, no news is good news.”

We know that everyone makes promises, and that’s great — as long as they deliver on them. And we’re pretty sure you’ve heard a lot of promises from a lot of travel management companies (TMCs) about how they can make business travel better for you.

We know that these days meeting the needs of travelers, travel managers, and procurement is always evolving, not unlike your business. Small businesses may need to scale up quickly and efficiently while making sure to keep an eye on their travel spend and bottom line. Large international organizations may be looking at acquiring or merging with other businesses or trying to determine how to create local policies within their global travel programs. And everyone needs data to keep track of their travel costs, look for savings opportunities, and deliver reports on their travel program to the c-suite.

No matter what you’ve heard, there’s only one ultimate goal — better business travel. When you have conversations around the best way to manage your travel, we’d like to remind you that you should expect more. Expect more from your TMC. Expect more when it comes to realizing savings. Expect more when it comes to delivering a first-class experience for your travel arrangers and travelers. We say this because you should expect more when it comes to better business travel.

Why should you expect more? Because you deserve it. Your business deserves it. Here are some things to consider when working with a TMC to get what you need.

Empower travelers with mobile technology

Mobile is the name of the game these days. Whether you’re booking travel, searching for in-policy options or trying to locate your travelers, none of this should be hard and that’s why we built our mobile app to make corporate travel easier. You should expect more from your TMC when it comes to arranging business travel and that starts with an easy-to-use mobile booking experience.

It’s no secret that every business traveler has their mobile device in hand wherever they go. Business travelers need to stay connected and get the support they deserve. Our app is localized for 17 different languages, our agents speak more than 30 languages, and travelers can easily access help by tapping on AssistMe, a feature we built to connect travelers to what they need when they need it.

Mobile can make or break travel programs and advances in 5G will impact business travel, but you can successfully integrate a mobile strategy to empower your travelers. How do we know this? Because we focus on the millions of customers that use our technology to build, and consistently update, the app to help everyone involved in your travel program — bookers, arrangers, travel managers. The result? Increased usage, traveler satisfaction, in-app bookings and approvals and features like Traveler Tracker to find travelers wherever they are.

Money matters — how you can find savings for your travel program

Our global business travel platform can meet your specific business needs when it comes to travel spend, expenses, and compliance.

From our extensive supply of exclusive, preferred hotel, air, car and rail rates — available to any of our customers across the globe — the Egencia Smart Mix technology surfaces the most relevant content so that you and your travelers can save time. Since we introduced Smart Mix in July 2019, we’ve seen the number of flights selected in the top 10 North American results increase 13 percent. And the Egencia Savings Finder for air gives you access to a dedicated team that monitors flight costs to help you save money. Over a six-month period in 2019, our customers have saved between an average of $145 and €595 per ticket.

Read more about how our platform offers up-to-date reports, helps you streamline expense processing, and lets you and your travelers easily book business travel from any device to help you save time and money.

A leader in corporate travel technology

The Egencia data science team is working with artificial intelligence (AI) teams across Expedia Group to build AI into our platform. We’re doing this to create a travel experience that’s more personalized and predictive of your travelers’ needs and preferences.

We developed a global business travel platform and we own all the technology across the entire business travel experience. This ensures comprehensive data capture which is a key step in helping us deliver preferred travel options for mobile and web users. And we know what we’re doing is working because we’ve seen a rise in bookings from the top travel options we deliver to travelers and travel arrangers. That’s the power of data science, AI, and machine learning: We can give you what you want as your first choice.

We also update our business travel platform more than 150 times every month and we’ve updated our app at least 24 times in the last year. We’re constantly working with our customers to develop technology solutions for their business travel needs.

Our customers drive our innovation, which is why we’ve created features like the Egencia Analytics Studio, a data visualization tool created specifically for business travel, an upgraded app that manages all travel functions, an industry first, and an online air exchange that simplifies flight rebooking.

These are just a few reasons why you should expect more from your TMC. Fill out the form to speak with someone on our team to find out how you can get more from your TMC.