Overview

With a presence in 24 locations across Asia, Europe, and the United States, this client is a London headquartered international investment bank that specialises in delivering independent, tailored advisory services across mergers and acquisitions, debt advisory, restructurings, and private capital raising.

The key objectives were:

• To transition all bookings to a single Online Booking Tool (OBT), reducing the disjointed booking process and delivering a consistent user experience
• To improve data accuracy by driving all travel spend into a centralised data warehouse, enabling better reporting, analytics, and informed decision-making.
• To enhance booking efficiency and accuracy through increased adoption of online booking, reducing manual errors and administrative workload.
• To drive consistent policy adherence by embedding travel policies directly into the booking tool, ensuring compliance is enforced at the point of sale.

Challenges

The implementation of a new singular online booking tool brought several challenges:

• Employees were resistant to change, and familiar with their current booking methods.
• Increasing compliance to the travel policy was challenging with frequent out of policy bookings.
• Migrating from multiple systems to single platform involved technical complexity and stakeholder coordination all while minimising the disruption of daily travel operations.

Solutions

Every customer is assigned an implementation lead to oversee their transition. This ensures effective planning, clear communication, and strong stakeholder engagement. To help drive engagement and adoption, we also provided recorded training sessions. These provided on-demand learning opportunities and served as a valuable point of reference. This flexible training approach helped to reduce resistance and build confidence in using the tool.

Travel policies were embedded directly into the booking workflow through policy implementation within the tool itself. This guided travellers towards compliant options during the booking process, significantly reducing out of policy bookings and increasing overall compliance.

MI data capture at the point of sale enabled accurate tracking and reporting of travel activity. This provided real-time insights into spend, booking behaviour, and policy compliance, empowering stakeholders to make data-driven decisions and continuously optimise their travel programme.

Results

With no accurate benchmarks due to the client being previously unmanaged, the introduction of our proprietary OBT, Lightning, drove an approximate 50% increase in online adoption. Given the complexity of their travel programme and reliance on offline bookings, this shift marks a significant move towards greater efficiency and traveller self-service.

Automated reporting capabilities have transformed the way the client monitors its travel activities. Comprehensive reports now cover critical areas such as CO2 emissions, cost savings, policy compliance, and employee wellbeing. This enhanced visibility has empowered decision-makers with timely, accurate data.