Travel managers the world over shared the mad scramble to identify and repatriate business travelers on those March days when the brutal consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic became apparent to corporations of all sizes. Far fewer did so on the heels of a just-deployed global travel services program, featuring a new global travel management company in dozens of countries, a refreshed travel policy and in some cases, a new online booking tool.
"In March, when the firm decided that we were going to put travel restrictions in place, we had to in an instant, like so many other companies, look at how many people do we have out on the road," said Hillary Dallas, senior director of global travel and meetings for insurance and professional services giant Aon. "We just kept saying to ourselves, ‘This would’ve been absolutely impossible six months prior.’ We just never would’ve been in the position to do what we were able to do in the course of 24 hours."
Of course, when Aon and Dallas more than two years ago embarked on the process of more fully globally consolidating its travel program and selecting an implementing a new global TMC, they never could have known how quickly their new structure would be put to the test by the onset of a worldwide calamity. But they were prepared for it.
Today, Aon’s travel program remains mostly dormant, limited to some essential travel in countries like Australia and New Zealand that are in better Covid-related shape than most, and conducted mostly by car. But before the pandemic, Aon’s travel program was among the world’s largest, with 2019 companywide travel and entertainment spending of nearly $280 million, according to Business Travel News’ Corporate Travel 100.
It was also a program at the end of 2017, when Dallas joined the firm, that was ready for a revamp in line with an internal companywide effort, dubbed Aon United, to deliver its services more broadly and consistently throughout the world.
"The charge was basically to bring this program together," Dallas said. "When I joined at the end of 2017, we knew there would be several steps taken to make that happen."
Crafting an RFP
Aon in 2017 had an incumbent travel management company that operated in about 30 countries, Dallas said, but the travel program was "very U.S.-to-U.K.-centered, because those made up the majority of the transactions." Dallas is based in Washington, D.C., while Aon’s global headquarters are in London. "The local stakeholders—whether that was an executive assistant or an operations manager or an office manager—were the ones dealing with it in [most other] countries."
Dallas’ first step in crafting a more comprehensive global program, she said, was soliciting the opinions and assessing the business needs in those various markets throughout the world to help determine the services Aon and its preferred TMC should provide.
"It was a large undertaking to go out and speak to all of our stakeholders, speak to our leadership and understand what their needs were," Dallas said. "We can be subject-matter experts. We know travel. But it had to work in tandem. We have to partner with our stakeholders because they’re the boots on the ground. They’re the ones in-country."
After soliciting that feedback, Dallas’ team made a key decision: It would look to choose and implement not only a single global consolidated TMC but also concurrently deploy a new online booking tool—if necessary—a new preferred global distribution system and other technology.
"We said, ‘Look, we’re not going to start here and just kind of piece this stuff in over the next few years.’ Let’s build it all at the same time," she said. "We did all of those things in tandem."
Aon formed an internal travel advisory council to help craft a global TMC request for proposals and evaluate responses. Members included Dallas and her team as well as several chief operating officers from various global regions and representatives from Aon’s legal, financial and expense management divisions. That council would continue to meet roughly every other month, when Dallas would update them on the progress of the RFP and the responses it received.
"This was a committee that worked with us very closely and helped guide the direction," Dallas said. "In addition, we spent a lot of time going out to all the markets [throughout the world] and shared what the strategy was, what the vision was, and got their support. There was no way we were going to do this, turn over this program and have this much change management involved, unless we got that universal support."
As for the RFP itself, Dallas said Aon tried to "build in everything we could. We tried to have as much foresight as we could, in terms of where we wanted the program to go and the bells and whistles that we wanted on the program."
The largest global travel management companies have a broad array of technological offerings and third-party partnerships, through which they can deliver any number of services. Dallas’ team wanted to know all the details, even if Aon decided not to deploy those services, or not to immediately implement them.
As examples, Dallas cited Aon’s use of rate-assurance provider TripBam and risk management provider WorldAware. Even though Aon intended to use those suppliers under the new contract, the team still wanted to hear about the bidding TMCs’ rate-assurance and security partnerships and capabilities.
"Whether it’s your [corporate social responsibility] reporting, whether it’s your insights reporting, lay it all on the table, we want to see it," Dallas said.
After the formal bidding process, Aon selected American Express Global Business Travel as its global travel management services provider. Because of the travel council’s desire to incorporate the full range of possible technology and other services, the contract with GBT was quite detailed and lengthy, Dallas said.
"We had to build in all our global data and security requirements. So we wanted to put all those technologies into place and go through this process once to cover as many countries as we could, so that we wouldn’t have to go through this every time we wanted to add a country," she said. "The differentiator, at least from what I’ve done in the past, was that we tried to think of everything and build that into the program, even if it wasn’t going to be turned on from day one."
Making the Switch
After selecting Amex GBT, Aon spent roughly six months designing the new travel program before rolling it out globally. That included a mild refreshing of Aon’s travel policy, which mandates use of GBT to book travel but allows for regional or country-level specifics regarding certain topics like permissible business-class use for long-haul flights.
"There were endless decisions that needed to be made as to how we were going to structure and set up the program," Dallas said. Among them was the incorporation of technology, including Amex GBT’s Expert Auditor pre-trip authorization and approval tool.
"We spent a lot of time working through all the nuances," she said. "For example, in Asia-Pacific, we had large markets like Australia and Singapore that had the full gamut of technologies and programs. And you have a country like the Philippines, where basically we were implementing the offline service, but they didn’t need pre-trip approval or some of the things that we were implementing in other markets."
The process also involved incorporating online booking tools. Aon selected SAP’s Concur Travel as its global online booking option, but several countries use other tools and Aon did not mandate a switch, Dallas said. Aon in France uses Amex GBT’s KDS online tool, and in some countries in Latin America uses Sabre’s GetThere.
"We decided that we were going to select the best tools for the market," she said. "This is an old story, right? Not every booking tool is perfect for every market. So we decided that to reduce some of the change management … we would stick with it. To me, that’s doing the best by our clients."
Aon began making the switch to the new program and Amex GBT in March 2019, and to date has implemented the program in about 45 countries with plans for an additional 10 or so by the end of 2021.
Ensuring reporting of travel data from TMCs in a consistent format can challenge even the most experienced global practitioners, and Aon has created dashboards to not only gain visibility into that spending but also monitor key metrics like the use of lowest logical fares. Where there are gaps in booked travel data reporting, particularly in rare cases of booking channel noncompliance, Dallas said, Aon will supplement its travel data with expense data.
This year, everything was going swimmingly with Aon’s agency implementation. Then came Covid-19.
The implementation of the new program, Amex GBT and its data feeds into WorldAware were key aspects of Aon’s ability to track every traveler and work to return them to their home countries as quickly as possible, particularly in March when the United States and several European countries began to restrict inbound travel.
Currently, only essential travel is allowed in most countries, according to Dallas, and any attempted booking through an Aon online tool will trigger the type of travel-warning messaging that pre-pandemic was reserved for bookings to high-risk locations.
"Our policy is, nobody has to travel. Nobody is required to travel during this time," Dallas said. "If somebody says, I’m not comfortable with it, of course that’s not something we push. But we do provide [travelers] with a ton of resources to get help and to be prepared for whatever they may be faced with." Those resources, she said, include links to travel advisories and contact information for 24/7 support.
Aon has shifted to virtual meetings, for now, and is closely managing the vast majority of them, she said. In the meantime, Dallas continues to refine the global program and plan for its further expansion, she said.
"There’s no doubt in my mind that travel is going to recover," Dallas said. "And when it does, the program is going to emerge even stronger than it was before we went into this thing. We’ve had the ability to take a pause, and when you’re not dealing with the day-in, day-out operational aspects of the program at the volume that we were dealing with, it allows us to stop and get some additional resources into building that program further."