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Why pay £220 for a rail ticket when you can pay £70? Martin Creasey of TNS has implemented an online rail booking system that works! Gillian Upton explains just how

Martin Creasey is feeling pretty pleased these days. He took on the travel relationships at his company during a maternity leave cover and made significant changes that have worked really well for the travellers and saved his company money.

“I haven’t had many problems from the bookers arising from the changes, which is good. They have adapted to the changes really quickly,” he says.

What he’s achieved is the pretty seamless implementation of an online rail booking tool at TNS, the largest UK market research company and the second largest in the world. TNS in the UK has more than 200 travellers, some of whom have to visit clients or co-ordinate fieldwork around the UK, often at short notice.

Creasey’s primary role is managing financial systems worldwide, as part of the Group Finance Department of TNS so his experience of systems implementations was useful during the project. “I don’t pretend to be an experienced travel manager, but as a frequent traveller myself, I know what matters to the traveller, and as an accountant, the cost implications are never far from my thoughts.”

Annual travel spend at TNS in the UK is over £1.5million. “My objective was to get travel at the best value to the business and to give the travellers the best service,” he says.

He inherited three travel relationships: HRG for flight booking and visa services etc; Hotelscene for hotel and conference bookings; and Harry Weeks Travel for UK train bookings. TNS employees presently book all their travel through a small team of PAs and department administrators.

Creasey was very interested in the amount spent each year on rail travel, which was more than £100,000. The company was utilising a manual voucher-based system for rail tickets introduced by Harry Weeks Travel some years ago. Travel bookers would write out details of the journey on a voucher and travellers could present this at the ticket barrier on the day of travel. The vouchers could not be used in the automatic ticket barriers on the underground, which was something of a drawback.

“The rail companies’ mission had been pressing for some time to discontinue the manual voucher-based ticketing, so I was faced with a need to make a change. Also, I felt that we were often being charged the highest fare by default,” says Creasey.

“Rail fares now include advance booking discounts, off-peak fares and the ability to buy two singles instead of one return ticket and I wasn’t convinced that we were always getting these cheaper deals.”

He would have preferred to reduce the number of travel providers, but HRG’s rail offering entailed posting the rail ticket to arrive at TNS the next day. “That wouldn’t have worked for us as we have lots of last-minute travel,” explains Creasey.

Another option was to book and collect a ticket from one of the 80 station collection machines around the country, except that list doesn’t include London Victoria or the three locations where TNS has large offices, in the City of London, Epsom and West London. “Our staff were used to having instant tickets and we could not have imposed a less convenient arrangement on them,” said Creasey.

He visited Harry Weeks and walked away with the ideal solution: Travelpackonline is a custom-built corporate rail self booking tool. “I was impressed with how easy it was to use. I didn’t want to spend time and money on training or reading manuals. This system was intuitive and it was very easy to see alternative options in terms of routings, discount options, buying two single fares rather than return fares and it provided access to instant ticketing. Ultimately, that swung it for me.”

Travelpackonline incorporates several flexible alternative ticketing options. TNS chose to purchase a ticket-printing machine (at £2,750) for their largest site so they could print out the credit-card-sized magnetically-coded tickets instantly, and these could also be valid on all stations on the London Under-ground. These machines can also be leased.

One problem TNS had anticipated beforehand was obtaining refunds when staff had to change their plans at the last minute. The Travelpack system allows tickets to be voided easily on the day of issue, a real plus for the company.

In other TNS sites there were insufficient numbers of travellers to justify the cost of purchasing more machines so Harry Weeks provided special security coded and numbered stationery to allow tickets to be printed directly on a standard laser printer. This type of ticket stock is supplemented by the provision of underground barrier passes to allow travellers to cross central London between mainline terminals.

Harry Weeks provides TNS with a consolidated electronic invoice promptly at the end of the month, complete with cost centre attribution and fare savings information, which is then uploaded easily into the company’s Oracle business systems.

“The management information comes out very easily in spreadsheet format and I can run reports to look at the pattern of travel and where we’ve used the best-priced fare, or not. I can also monitor compliance with our travel policy and can see explanations from when the cheapest available fare has not been taken up,” explains Creasey.

The entire implementation process was fast and problem free. “What we’ve done with Harry Weeks has been very successful and they were really supportive throughout the process. There really were no teething problems and the feedback has been very positive and I think they all like the flexibility and ease of use of the new system.”

To date, TNS has only empowered the administrators to book and issue the tickets, but in the future travellers will make their own online travel bookings, and further reduce the administration effort.

The Travelpackonline system has also been configured to align with the company’s travel policy so that if it wishes, TNS can restrict the classes of fares available to individual travellers or administrators.

Early this year Creasey will review the system again to see what further improve-ments can be made. In the meantime, Harry Weeks will shortly introduce a new ticketing method that will allow travellers to collect pre-booked tickets using a PIN number from a PC and ticket machine that will be conveniently located.

Creasey knows there have been “substantial” savings and from the MI data he can identify easily where savings have been made over standard fares.

“I can see that we definitely are saving costs compared with the way we worked previously. For example, if you have access to all the ticket permutations you can potentially get a standard £220 return rail ticket for as little as £70,“ he says.

Content that rail spend is now being contained, his focus has switched to air travel, trialling the HRG online air booking system with a couple of regular bookers.

“I’d be very surprised if we didn’t decide to go down this route too in the near future,” he concludes.

THE PROS AND CONS

The Pros
1. People are increasingly used to doing things for themselves on the internet. If you make it easy for them, they will readily adjust to new ways of working.

2. Rail fare permutations are inherently complex – a good online booking system will help you cut through the complexity and deliver real cost savings and process efficiencies.

3. With any system, when everything works perfectly, nobody notices. “No comment” may be the biggest compliment you will receive.

The Cons
1. A single one-stop travel provider would be ideal, but different travel services demand different specialities.

2. People inherently resist change so make sure that you deliver real service improvements to convince them that the change is worthwhile.

THE BLUEPRINT FOR SUCCESS

1. See if you can get something more out of your existing supplier relationships. If you think the way you work at present can be improved, challenge your suppliers to help you.

2. If you intend to move to an online booking system, it should be intuitive. If you don’t make a new system easy to use, you risk that they will go off and do their own thing.

3. Listen to your travellers and make sure your ideas will work well for them. Cost saving is important but you must balance this with process efficiency and travel convenience.

4. Listen to what your potential supplier has done with other clients. Be open-minded to new ways of working that may be different from the way it has been before.

5. Ensure that whatever system you use will allow you to move forward. Nothing is more certain than that there will be more change to come; anticipate it.

6. Stay on top of your implementation project. Be clear at the outset about what you want from it and don’t allow the scope to ‘creep’ once you have started the process.

7. Communicate effectively before, during and after the project so that everyone affected knows how the change will affect them.

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