Planning ahead
Corporate travel buyers don’t need to know everything about the bewildering tangle of possibilities on offer. They do, however, need the right tools and the ability to know where to look.
By Graeme Payne
Accommodation
Location is the key element in choosing suitable accommodation, and the frequent traveller often knows a city’s geography better than most, so listen out for titbits from your travellers.
Northstar Travel Media provides a series of accommodation-related publications that are available in paper or online. These include Official Hotel Guide International Online (OHGI) and Official Hotel Guide, with 29,000 in-depth hotel descriptions worldwide. The company also produces Official Meetings and Facilities Guide, which is a global resource for meetings planners, detailing the likes of prices, services and contact information for meetings venues.
Flights and Airlines
OAG is one of the world’s leading suppliers of air travel-related information and also publishes an invaluable guide to the UK’s rail system, OAG Rail Guide, which started over 150 years ago. OAG Executive Flight Guide, Europe, Africa and Middle East provides comprehensive unbiased flight schedule information in an easy-to-read format. The publication lists over 86,000 scheduled direct and connecting services - including the low-cost carriers - along with airline reservation numbers and additional airport information. The OAG Flight Guide is another useful travel planning guide, with details of over 500,000 worldwide direct and connecting flights.
The company also produces OAG Flight Planner in CD format and an online service, www.OAGflights.com, where subscribers can access worldwide flight data as well as check the status of major flights and cabin class availability before contacting their travel management company.
If seat width and leg room is an issue, you can compare details by checking out www.SeatGuru.com
The annual Columbus World Travel Guide has comprehensive data relating to travel in every country in the world, including passport, health, and visa information. This essential information can also be easily researched using the publisher’s new website, www.gocoti.com
Columbus also provides tools for the travel planner through the Columbus World City Guide and Columbus World Airport Guide. The Columbus World Travel Atlas includes world and regional maps, airport locations and useful diagrams and graphs explaining the business and social structure of the world’s continents and countries.
Travel policies and budgets
Those involved in travel purchasing are also becoming far more involved in budgeting, composing and monitoring travel policies and expense control. In these situations the company may well need to invest in more sophisticated management systems. If these are being considered, it’s wise to take advice from your organisation’s travel management company so that booking and buying procedures are compatible with expense control.
Travel buyers can keep up to date by meeting the suppliers and brokers at the Business Travel Show. The next will be in London, at Olympia, from 1st to 3rd February 2005.
Time spent in reconnaissance is seldom wasted. Researching for the right choices will avoid mistakes and help ensure seam free travel.
Find out more:Graeme Payne has trained on travel related subjects in over 60 countries around the world and has worked with hundreds of major companies, airlines and government departments to ensure that they manage their travel effectively. He currently writes for a number of travel magazines in UK and USA and is author of the annual International Luxury Travel Market catalogue. In 2004 he is working in India, Thailand, Morocco, Spain and Canada, researching leisure and business travel for a number of guides used by travel agents and corporations.
