If you frequently book hotels throughout the year, and you don't have an Accommodation Portfolio, you're missing a trick. By building a picture of your executives' travel habits you can approach key venues or accommodation groups and offer them your business - in exchange for significant discounts. You can also eliminate those one-off disasters, when your travelling exec has a bad hotel stay by viewing and monitoring your hotel choices. (And you can certainly avoid the even worse scenario, where one business traveller has a bad stay, but another of your execs gets sent there!)

Here are some thoughts on getting started:

1. You need to gather together as much travel management information as you can, something the serious travel organiser should always be doing. For those who use travel management companies, ask for a detailed picture of the hotel bookings made by your staff for the last two to three years as well as their travel movements.



2. For those who work in SMEs and organise all the business travel yourselves, start your own management information. Take a typical couple of months, and on an Excel spreadsheet log every booking you make - the location, the hotel, the duration, the cost, other facilities used such as gyms, travel cost, etc. Get as much detail as possible so that later on you can analyse your firm's accommodation usage by location, duration, quality level, venues or groups used, peak times of year, etc.



3. Survey as many of your business travellers as you can, or at least a representative sample. Ask them why they stay where they do, which facilities they really value, what their ideal journey time would be from venue to airport, or venue to business meeting, if they are collecting loyalty points, etc. Beware of those who insist they need a fully equipped gym at each hotel, but who never actually set foot in it during their stays!



4. Armed with your detailed picture of your company's travel habits and needs, you can approach hotel and serviced apartment groups with confidence, ready to negotiate. If you can prove that your firm uses 100 room nights a year in central Manchester, and you're prepared to guarantee 75% of that to one group in exchange for good discounts, you'll be able to negotiate some great rates. Build a short-list of possible hotels and premises you would like to deal with.



5. Visit all your short-listed hotels and apartments. Check out whether the brochure matches the reality, and get a feel for the staff. Try to arrange to have one point of contact, also, for your firm's travellers. Get venues to guarantee availability, too, as there is no sense spending time coming to an agreement if your staff can never get a room there!



6. When you have negotiated with your hotels, apartment groups, etc, and made agreements with them, prepare a clear document for all travelling staff, to alert them to the changes. You could place this on the intranet, if you have one. Make it a really straightforward guide to which hotel groups they can use, in which areas, and which level of rooms they can expect to stay in. Make sure everyone knows - protect yourself from the charge of, "Well nobody told me!"



7. Even within your fixed framework, try to build in choice for staff, partly so that they have a good chance of getting availability, and partly so that they don't feel so restricted. Persuading your travelling staff to embrace your new Accommodation Portfolio can be difficult at first, as all they may see is that their freedom to stay where they please has been curtailed in the name of company savings. Explain the reasoning behind your choices.



8. Monitor your Accommodation Portfolio regularly to make sure prices, availability, quality of rooms and facilities, and staff experience are still good. Listen, too, to any venues who have queries about the deal or any staff - building such a relationship with hotels is just that, a relationship, and there needs to be mutual respect in the partnership for it to work.