Are you really managing travel?

KesselRun VP of program management, Krissy Herman, said that she’s seeing more SMEs that were lightly managed before or had some policy in place wanting to “build it up a little bit more.”

“We’re seeing a lot of prospects come to us asking about TMC consolidation services or just management of the programme in general because either travel just reported to whomever, and now they want somebody with a bit more experience and expertise on it, but don’t think they’re large enough for a travel manager,” Herman said. Or they had to let go of their travel manager during the pandemic, and “now are looking for more of an outsourced model in that space.”

The services these SMEs are looking for are as varied as the companies themselves.

Traveller safety and duty of care is one obvious need, because during the pandemic, companies that didn’t have a managed travel programme had to manage disruption directly, Geall said. He added that a near-equal in terms of priorities is cost management, because “one of the trends has been that [SMEs] have been having to manage the challenge of rising costs of travel and accommodation.”

Put another way, after companies cut travel during the pandemic and that budget line item plummeted, as travel comes back, “putting those back jn [the budget] becomes a little bit more painful,” said Direct Travel CEO, Christal Bemont. “Once something’s off of a line item, it’s really hard for it to come back and to then manage it. So,that cost containment and cost management has just heightened relative to making sure that [travel managers] are watching every dollar and where travellers are going.”

Online fraud and cybersecurity concerns have become another factor for SMEs. In the mid-market, “we’re seeing as intense security concerns and requirements as there are in any complex large business right now,” said Gant Travel Management president, Patrick Linnihan, adding that previously, some mid-market companies didn’t think they were big enough for anyone to come after. “All the mid-markets are ramping up their security with everything as sophisticated as what you see at the biggies.”

Over the past two years, Gant, which specialises in SME clients, implemented SOC 2 based on increasing client requests. SOC 2 is a cybersecurity compliance framework for third-party service providers to help ensure the security and privacy of customer data, as well as compliance with regulations and risk mitigation.