Terror attacks prompted businesses to consider alternative ways to meet

By RICK BARRETT
rbarrett@journalsentinel.com
Last Updated: July 21, 2003

Forty percent of businesses in 2003 have reduced their travel budgets from 2002 levels, and 34% have barely maintained such budgets from a year ago, according to a new survey of 280 corporate travel professionals.

Many agree that corporate travel budgets will never return to previous levels, says the survey from Runzheimer International, a Rochester, Wis., management consulting firm.

Some companies have cut travel expenses by using self-directed, online booking systems and non-refundable airfares.

Others have embraced travel alternatives, such as teleconferencing and conferences by Web or video, said Phyllis Schumann, senior editor of Runzheimer Reports on International Travel.

Among the companies surveyed, 81% provided their employees with teleconferencing as an alternative to air travel.

Seventy percent offered videoconferencing, and 58% used Web conferencing.

"The word alternative as it relates to travel will eventually disappear," Schumann said. "The new travel-alternative technologies will simply be regarded as another business tool, just as the telephone, fax and e-mail."

Businesses have learned many lessons since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks turned travel upside down, according to the survey.

"There are no intentions to return to our levels of air travel prior to Sept. 11," one corporate travel manager wrote in the survey.

"Although Sept. 11 was a tragedy, the event helped eliminate between $8 million and $18 million in unnecessary travel," the manager said in the survey. "We feel that the current volume of travel is appropriate, and we will continue to encourage travel only when necessary."

Another executive wrote: "We have been able to continually execute with less travel; management understands this."

Some companies have required travel plans to be approved by vice president-level management and corporate security, according to the Runzheimer survey.

Some companies have limited travel to assignments in which the final objective cannot be achieved by telephone or videoconference. New rules, programs and penalties for changing travel plans are a headache for corporate travel managers.

They could also affect any who regularly hit the road. "Among travelers
- business and leisure - the consensus is, there is no longer anything fun about travel," the survey says.

Companies can't forgo all trips,
because it would be shooting themselves in the foot, Schumann said. "At first blush, the cost of travel alternatives versus airfare and lodging may show significant dollar savings," she said. "However, what is unknown is whether alternatives are costing you money."

But frequent
travel can result in lost business if it's an inefficient way to communicate with customers, said Kevin Mitchell, chairman of the Business Travel Coalition in Radnor, Pa. "With the pace of business today, if we managed 100 relationships 10 years ago, it's probably closer to 1,000 today," he said. "So with young employees especially, the first instinct is not to jump on an airplane to solve a problem".

Today's electronic conferencing capabilities, while advanced when compared with the early 1990s, will seem crude in a few years, said Mitchell.

"I think we are only beginning to see the dollars that will flow into (travel alternative) technologies," he said. About 24% of the companies surveyed by Runzheimer tied travel statistics to other data when figuring company performance, and that figure is growing. "It has been a hard lesson for everyone," Schumann said, "but many companies have found they can not only survive, but they can grow," without as much travel. "It is difficult to determine if we are on the doorstep or the heels of change," she said. "Regardless, technology will continue to challenge people, processes and our comfort levels. An uncertain economy creates a need for all of us to approach life differently, and adopt new measures in the workplace."

From the July 22, 2003 editions of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel