Time to tackle your team’s hotel booking behaviour?
FCM puts you in the driver’s seat.

We get it. People like to book their own accommodation. Unlike flight bookings, browsing for hotels can be fun. Travellers love choice, have different preferences when it comes to booking accommodation, and often have their favourite neighbourhoods and local restaurants when they travel.

But while you don’t want to be a killjoy, hotels are a big expense in the travel category.

In fact, rogue bookings (when travellers book their own flights or accommodation) are the biggest threat to a travel programme’s performance. These bookings are difficult to track; making it impossible to eliminate leakage, keep a handle on your budget, optimise your programme or negotiate with suppliers.

So what’s stopping you? Here are just four good reasons to relook how you book:

1 Duty of Care

One of the most important reasons to drive booking behaviour? Duty of care. After all, how can you keep your travellers safe if you don’t know where they are?

Business travel has always had an element of risk, be it geopolitical upheaval, industrial action or adverse weather events. COVID has simply added another layer of complexity. And if things go wrong, your number one priority is to bring your people home.

Today, technology facilitates traveller safety. From an impressive choice of safe, vetted and trusted suppliers to interactive safety dashboards, the FCM Platform gives you an immediate snapshot of where your travellers are, including flight times, ETAs, accommodation bookings, itineraries and more. Added to this, instant travel alerts and ‘always on’ travel assistance means FCM is by your side. 24/7.

2 Choice

When it comes to booking accommodation, travellers remain convinced that there’s a bigger selection online, and historically that might have been true. Not anymore! FCM has developed and built our own omnichannel technology which puts the widest selection of aggregated content at your fingertips. The platform allows you to search from over 28 million nightly rates available – in line with your travel policy if you will.

Itinerary management is also a breeze, and travellers can make any changes or updates directly in the platform without ever having to pick up the phone. In fact, the booking experience is central to the design of the FCM Platform and users can:

• Book hotels on any device at any time, either online or via our consultants
• Take complete control over itinerary management – including hotel bookings
• Make changes quickly and easily
• Receive up-to-the-minute information and travel alerts
• Reach FCM’s dedicated Travel Consultants 24/7 via chat, calls or email.

We know that more content, a wider range of accommodation types and competitive rates = satisfied travellers and much happier travel managers! What’s even better is that the experience is seamless and effortless. There’s no longer any need to open ten tabs just to make one hotel booking!

3 Compliance

Driving compliance is key to a successful travel programme. Not only does it make a massive difference to duty of care, but it can also have a significant impact on your bottom line.

The reality is that volume bookings allow you to negotiate with accommodation suppliers, securing better rates and payment terms as well as perks like free upgrades, free breakfast, early check-in and late check-out. In other words, not only will you have peace of mind that your travellers are staying in safe, vetted accommodation, but you’ll deliver a better experience to boot. It’s a win win in anyone’s book.

But your travellers have to play along. The FCM Platform builds policy compliance into every step of the booking journey through:

• Compliance drivers, for example filters that highlight preferential suppliers, preferential rates, cost management and even sustainability considerations like CO2 emissions.
• Awareness drivers, including notifications and alerts which share relevant information at the right time in order to ‘prompt’ bookers to make an informed choice. If travel bookers stray from your policy – they’ll know.

The platform can be customised to your organisation’s unique needs, while in-built ‘gamification’ ensures easy, intuitive and seamless navigation. After all, ‘more’ content should never be messy or complicated. It’s a smart, slick system geared towards more choice – and full compliance.

4 Clarity

The beauty of compliance is that it, in turn, contributes to full visibility over your travel programme. Say goodbye to ‘invisible’ spend and nasty surprises and hello to customised reporting dashboards which allow you to see exactly where you stand – at any given moment – in terms of bookings (past and future), budgets and actual expenditure.

FCM doesn’t just aggregate awesome content; we aggregate meaningful, accurate data that gives you a good understanding of your travellers’ behaviour, preferences and spend – invaluable when it comes to supplier negotiations!

The FCM Platform boasts ‘Next-Gen’ AI reporting functionalities, meaning you’ll be able to pull up the data you want in seconds; identify areas of overspending, gaps in your travel policy and potential savings; and make informed decisions and relevant changes.

If you’re struggling to drive hotel booking behaviour, FCM just made it easier. Whether you’re talking duty of care, choice, compliance or clarity – we’ve got you covered.