Global
Policy and compliance: continued opportunities abound
Global perspective
Improving corporate travel policy and traveler compliance consistently ranks as a top priority
in
CWT’s annual travel buyer
survey, with 68% of respondents indicating “improving traveler compliance will be their main
concern in 2011, and 44% ranking “optimizing the travel policy” as top of mind. CWT published
comprehensive
research on
policy and compliance in 2008, and offers a CWT Solutions Group practice area to help meet
continued client need.
Policy and compliance remains a topic of industry conversation year after year, prompting
consideration on why satisfaction consistently eludes so many. The answer may be simply that, in
this area of managed travel, the work is never done. Evolutions in the industry such as airline
consolidation and the rise of ancillary fees, combined with economic cycles that prompt some
companies to scale travel up or down, require an organization to continually update its travel
policy to reflect its current response to ever-changing market dynamics. And an updated travel
policy is just the beginning; from there, travelers need to be informed of changes and motivated to
adhere to them, with automated support and enforcement should they not. Unfortunately, the
importance of change management around the implementation of a revised or new travel policy is
often underestimated, and can leave the new policies susceptible to challenges before they’ve even
gone into effect.
Following are the critical success factors CWT has identified for advancing effectiveness
with travel policies and compliance. These success factors remain as relevant today as when CWT
first outlined them in its 2008 research.
