Outsourced travel management – roles where the person doing the work is
not employed directly by the company they are working for – is on the increase.
“The number of [outsourced] engagements we have has almost doubled since 2019,”
says Sara Andell, director, consulting strategy for American Express Global
Business Travel, generally considered (including by itself) the largest
provider of outsourced travel managers. “Outsourcing is now the biggest part of
Amex GBT consulting by both headcount and revenue. We have just shy of 100
individuals working for 70 clients.”
Lynne Griffiths, CEO of corporate travel recruitment specialist Sirius
Talent Solutions, who places plenty of insourced travel managers too, agrees.
“There has been a lot more outsourcing in the last 12-18 months,” she says.
One explanation identified by Andell is medium-sized companies beginning to
manage their travel activities more systematically. “They are appreciating
travel is complex,” she says. “It’s ‘I need that travel manager role but I
don’t need a full-time person and where am I going to find the expertise within
my business?’”
Larger companies which do have full-time travel managers also find travel
increasingly complicated, according to Louise Kilgannon, head of outsourcing
for Festive Road, another major outsourcing provider. “Travel managers are
doers but they can’t be experts in everything,” she says, pointing to
sustainability legislation and technology as fields of knowledge where
additional help might be needed.
In addition to these strategic tasks, there are also more outsourced
operational and technical roles. Examples cited by Andell include managing the
inbox of communications from travellers, creating traveller awareness campaigns
and administering online booking tools or payment card reconciliation.
In the past, Kilgannon says, travel managers received internal support
from departments as IT and corporate communications, but “all of a sudden some of
these roles are sitting within the travel programme so the regular talent pool
where you have to find people has to expand. Six or seven years ago, outsourcing
was ‘I need three regional travel managers.’ We still have a bit of that but
there’s definitely a shift.”
There is a clear overlap between these specialised outsourced tasks and
regular consulting services provided by the likes of Amex GBT Consulting and Festive
Road, but they are not the same.
“The difference with being a consultant is that as an outsourced travel
manager I was empowered to make decisions on the company’s behalf,” says one
veteran whose career has included both insourced and outsourced travel management
and independent consulting roles. “Consultants bring ideas to a client, which
makes the decision.”
Length of service is not the determining factor. “I worked for a bank for
eight years but that was as a consultant: it was a continuous succession of
projects and I didn’t make decisions,” the same travel manager says.
Another crucial determinant is the extent to which the individual is
treated and also perceived as part of the company to which they are assigned. “Typically that individual works in the
client’s host system,” says Andell. “They will have a client laptop and perform
tasks on the client’s behalf in the system.”
Kilgannon adds: “With an outsourcing engagement the individual becomes
part of the travel team. They are really integrated and are presented to
internal stakeholders and suppliers as a team member.” Typically, the
outsourced travel manager will have an internal e-mail address at the client
company.
If an outsourced travel manager acts and looks so much like an insourced
one, one might wonder why companies don’t simply insource instead? The key
reason is flexbility, and not just because of the opportunity to create a role
that is not full-time – after all, it is perfectly possible to insource
permanent but part-time staff.
Instead, says the veteran travel manager of his outsourcing days, employers
could “flex the work up or down; or, if they suddenly decided they were going
to restructure or sell the company, they didn’t have to worry about redundancy
costs for me. It was a good way to have the expertise without having the
headcount.”
There is also more flexibility in matching personnel to the changing
needs of the travel programme. “The client can scale,” says Andell. “We might
come in to do one piece of work and then it will develop into something else,
or functionally you might want a completely different resource at different
times. At the end of the contract term, that individual will come back to us and play a different role, or it can be
extended by the client. It has a lot of advantages against a long-term
employment contract.”
Weighed against these advantages, Kilgannon counsels that “there are some
barriers in an outsourced role. We tell our clients to think really carefully
about this. Your access to internal stakeholders can be slightly limited.
Access to internal data where there are external regulatory bodies can also be
ring-fenced from an externally outsourced team.”
Likewise, there are a mixture of pros and cons for travel managers who opt
for outsourced roles. One who has enjoyed the work very much is Esther van der
Aa, especially for the variety it offers. “Being outsourced provides fresh
challenges,” she says. “I learn a lot from different companies and their
different travel programmes. It brings me extra expertise from which my clients
can benefit.”
Van der Aa also finds that outsourced travel managers are more respected.
“That has constantly been my experience,” she says. “When I was in-house I had
more trouble standing in front of the board and persuading them to follow my
direction.”
Conversely, however, van der Aa finds outsourced travel managers can be treated
less favourably by rank-and-file employees, who sometimes level accusations of
“double-hatting”: serving two masters. “They imply that you are playing for
multiple teams and not 100 per cent committed to the company,” she says.
Another constituency who might regard outsourced travel management with
suspicion is insourced travel managers. Are the outsourcers coming for their
jobs?
Kilgannon and Andell both refute this suggestion emphatically and both
also say that in the vast majority of cases the people commissioning outsourced
travel managers are insourced travel managers themselves seeking additional
support for their team.
“It’s not to say we can’t do the global travel management role,” says
Andell, “but a lot more are regional or doing particular specialist functions.
The idea we are coming for your job... I would rather flip it and say how can we
help you be really successful at your role by giving you people who are
specialists? I can see a really strong case for having an in-house manager.
It’s a stakeholder role, ultimately, where you are having to talk to finance,
HR and budget-holders. Often that could be better executed by someone in-house.”
Recruitment specialist Griffiths agrees that outsourced travel managers
are not taking insourced travel managers’ jobs. Instead, she says, “we used to
see lots of travel management company account managers being poached for travel
manager roles and now we’re not seeing so much of that.”
One senior travel manager who regularly makes use of both specialised and
operational outsourced travel managers is Mia Andersson, head of global travel
management for Scania. She is confident insourced senior travel managers’ roles
are safe.
“You can outsource the whole programme but you
still need someone internally to be the quality checker and make sure the
delivery is according to the contract,” Andersson says. “Having a general
procurement person who somewhat knows travel to do that wouldn’t be good. You
need a senior person knowledgeable about the category.”