Skip to main content

How UK Charity Saved a Third On Business Travel

Charity-celebration-image.jpg

UK based charity saves a third on business travel

5 min
Company
Anonymous
Industry
Charity

Background

We know business travel is an expense every organisation needs to manage, and we know how to help you keep track of your travel spend and find opportunities to save. We also know every cent counts when you're a non-profit charity or small business and that your travel expenditures can’t be taken lightly.

If you're a charity that depends entirely on fundraising, you need to stretch the money you raise — it needs to go a long way, serve a multitude of purposes, and the organisation must meticulously account for everything it spends.

The importance of gaining spend visibility and controlling policy led a UK-based non-profit organisation to look for a travel management solution. The charity, which promotes inclusion and positivity with an annual global celebration, needed a way to manage their travel costs better.

The challenge

The charity which celebrates inclusion and diversity, has a mission that involves embracing people with positivity and acceptance. Part of this mission’s promotion includes a global annual celebration weekend. The event, which costs the charity up to £95,000 involves bringing in musicians and performers from all over the UK to perform.

The charity's annual celebration involves a lot of organising, relying on a dedicated set of volunteers to lend their support. It also includes a changing selection of artists, booked to perform year on year. Both the artists and the volunteers may be required to travel, and as such needed their potentially one-off trips arranged.

Gaining visibility into their travel spend was also crucial. The charity wanted to ensure that all of the funds they raised were going to the best use and providing the most value to their organisation. Non-compliance and infrequent lowest cost bookings were becoming an increasingly difficult issue to manage.

Controlling costs

The majority of travel bookings involved hosting and delivering the actual celebration weekend, but planning, promoting and talking to media took place throughout the year as well. To get better control over their spend, save money and time, and build clear policy around required trips, the charity decided to bring a travel management company (TMC) onboard.

Egencia supported the charity to start defining and rolling out travel policy to realise control and consistency over spend. Saving on travel was their priority and the new policy required all trips to be booked as the lowest fare option available. Egencia's platform then allowed the policy to be woven in to the booking tool, making it easier to for travellers to stay within policy.

The charity was also able to find lower accommodation costs in Egencia's extensive hotel supply than they had previously been able to access. These preferred rates were a vast improvement on what their previous searches provided and allowed them to save money on accommodation both in the planning stages (promotion and organisation) and during the live event (the celebration weekend itself).

"I make huge savings as the Egencia rates are so competitive. It's a good supply and a good piece of mind."

In aligning the policy, platform and guidance, the charity saw their yearly travel spend drop by a third.

Seeing the spend

Gaining better visibility into travel spend through data visualisation reports with the Egencia Analytics Studio has been an advantage for the charity, saving them time and money. Through the data the charity is able to collect and review, they can see where money has been spent, measure it against their budget and the relevant promotional or live events and invoice appropriately, all in the same place.

"Egencia brought structure and consistency to how money is spent. It's been eye-opening to bring in reporting and spend visibility. When you don't have a TMC, spend can be difficult to trace,"

Gaining efficiency

The charity needed to simplify the challenging and complex process of managing multiple journeys for all the artists, musicians, groups and volunteers, including accommodation and transport.

To simplify the travel booking for each traveller, the travel arranger used 10 guest traveller profiles in the Egencia platform to arrange all travel and accommodation. Using the guest traveller profiles meant the charity could book travel for all volunteers and performers — including group bookings for those artists in bands — without needing an assigned booking name. The guest traveller profiles also allowed the charity to complete the booking at the time of reservation which really improved efficiency and gave the organisation back invaluable work time, as it meant they no longer had to make last minute or multiple individual bookings.

"Using the guest traveller profiles, I can make savings by booking apartments where musicians and their supporting crew; and even whole bands can stay together. In terms of spending control and reporting it is great — we can see which spend was for a trustee and which for an artist,"

Saving money with Egencia

Charities and small businesses have a huge responsibility when it comes to juggling finances. Getting visibility on business travel spend, and finding savings, is an excellent place to start making a difference. By partnering with Egencia, this non-profit organisation has saved time and money on their business travel — significant savings that can be poured back into their important fundraising efforts and celebration planning.

"Working with Egencia has been so easy, our Account Manager has helped take care of all the details for us and asks all the right questions to help meet our needs,"

Contact us

Want to learn how your business can realise travel savings with managed travel? Find out how — contact us now.

The charity in this case study has asked to remain anonymous.

Was this content helpful?
0