Eloise Ferrara-Neched, senior procurement manager at Royal Mail Group, was named Travel Buyer of the Year at the Business Travel Awards Europe 2022. Relatively new to the travel category, she was praised by judges for making user experience changes during challenging times. Calling her a champion for change, the judges also said that recognising someone so new to the industry in a non-global organisation should send a message to those considering entering the industry that you can achieve great things and be recognised for it. She spoke to BTN Europe after her triumph.
BTN Europe: You’ve worked in procurement across a number of different categories, so how are you finding travel?
Eloise Ferrara-Neched: It’s very emotive. The learning curve was straight up. Fortunately we had a fairly well-developed programme and our TMC, Agiito, has been a good partner. It's all about how you manage people and their expectations and looking after each other. I’ve found that transfers from your supplier agreements into the experiences that your travellers have. All of my suppliers in whatever role I'm doing… for me it's a partnership. It's not a them and us. It's how we can work together to make it good for the business and to make it good for the traveller.
BTNE: Where did you approach the role?
EFN: I approach any category that I’ve worked in by learning, communicating, collaborating and putting my hand up – you just have to get involved. The first travel event I went to was Business Travel Show Europe in September 2021. At the time I knew very little about travel; I didn’t know the industry. The show was a good learning experience, especially as I attended as a hosted buyer and was really looked after.
BTNE: You have a multifaceted role, so how much of your time does the travel element take up?
EFN: Quite a lot, but it’s been a weird and challenging year because we’ve come out of lockdown when [before] it was probably easier because there was less travel and fewer challenges. Coming out of lockdown, people have to re-learn processes, we have new people to educate too following a management review last year, and then there’s all the challenges we’re seeing in the industry.
BTNE: Tell us about your travel programme.
EFN: Our travel is largely domestic UK with some international travel – more than I realised at first. There is a lot of rail travel, however road is still quite high and we are targeting this and encouraging more people towards rail through our campaigns – the first being eTickets and more recently Road to Rail [see below]. Hotels are mostly mid-range and I’ve been introducing more aparthotels for longer or more regular stays as we look at the wellbeing of our travellers. Our reasons for travel are varied: to meet partners or suppliers, for project work, for internal training and meetings – we have a lot of smaller meetings which due to their nature tend to be offsite – and we have a lot of seasonal travel and travel by managers around the estate, to our mail centres and distribution centres.
BTNE: Is travel generally booked online?
EFN: Our online adoption is excellent and currently we have 93 per cent of travel booked online. But I’m always a ‘100’ sort of person and I like to challenge myself, so I’d like to push that up. There’s always going to be the trips that you just can’t book online and some of the international trips can be tricky, especially in the current climate. Compliance to our programme is also high, in the 90s, but there is always room for improvement and the policy refresh and simplification will help address this.
BTNE: How about your hotel programme? You're going through an RFP...
EFN: We have corporate rates and we're going to RFP for hotels soon. I know we're going to see increases there on what we have at the moment. What I don't want is to see the hotels come back with prices we can't achieve or they can't achieve, or where we're not going to get any availability. Unfortunately I think some of these issues are going to last for more than a year. The cost of travel is affecting us already and I don't see that ending in 2023. We also need to manage the expectations of our travellers because industry capacity issues will continue to impact us too.
BTNE: The Business Travel Awards Europe judges called out a couple of things when bestowing the award on you, including making some user experience changes. Tell us about the Road to Rail campaign.
EFN: Our travel programme was well established and as I was new to travel so I didn’t want to change too much too soon when I came into the role. I quickly developed an excellent working relationship with the Agiito team, particularly my account manager Chris Piggin who worked with me to understand the industry and get me up to speed, and we now have a number of campaigns under way. Road to Rail is designed to push people from car journeys on to the train and I’ve been working with LNER, Avanti and GWR on that. It’s part of meeting our sustainability targets but it’s equally about traveller wellbeing. We have about 28 million kilometres on roads per year and we want to switch at least 15 per cent of that to rail. There’s a lot of communication around it internally and we’ve also had EA/PA showcase events which have additionally brought in managed taxi partners so we can try and get some more control and visibility over that service and hopefully deliver some savings. We’ve also refreshed our travel policy. It used to be a static document and duplicated across a guide and a policy, so we’ve simplified it and made things a lot clearer.
BTNE: Any new policies pertaining to accommodation requirements?
EFN: I've been introducing more aparthotels as part of a campaign that we've been running as we look at the wellbeing of the travellers. So if they're travelling more regularly, or if they need a base to work from, or they’re staying more than two nights somewhere, then we promote those types of hotels because they’re more of a home from home. We’ve configured the booking tool to show aparthotels first against a search for more than two nights.
BTNE: And you’ve recently piloted live meetings availability?
EFN: Yes, Agiito’s Meetingspro platform allows us to view rates and live venue availability and then submit enquiries direct to the venues that have availability. I’ve been working very closely with the Agiito team and regularly offer my feedback as they adapt their technology. Feedback from EAs so far is that they are excited to use this, as it will enable them to make short-lead bookings quicker. I’m looking forward to working with the team as they continue to develop their meetings technology, such as instant book, which will be a gamechanger.
BTNE: What do you think travel volumes going to look like in 2023?
EFN: That’s an interesting question as it’s been quite a crazy time coming out of lockdown and travel volumes shot up as everyone wanted to travel. It was always going to go a bit crazy when everyone came out of lockdown, but as essential workers we were travelling throughout the pandemic, so it wasn’t such a huge jump for us. The non-essential travel came back with a bit of a vengeance, but I don’t think it’s necessarily going to increase significantly in 2023 and may level out for a bit and then increase gradually. I think there's certainly going to be challenges around travel as the industry recovers. The focus has really shifted to ensuring we are getting the best value out of whatever journey that we're taking.
BTNE: What’s your biggest challenge right now?
EFN: Probably that things change so frequently in terms of what people want, and I’m sure other organisations are seeing the same thing. We've had people driving to one meeting who’ve got a call and then had to head off to a completely different location, so their accommodation needs to be cancelled and somewhere new booked pretty swiftly. That very dynamic, constantly changing environment seems to be the biggest challenge right now. It's actually led to me introducing what we call a ‘Heads Up’ process. I’ve set up a PA and EA group and I’ll send out a weekly email asking for a heads-up on any urgent group accommodation needs or meetings, flights etc – anything urgent or difficult. Then I’ll discuss those with the Agiito team in the afternoon so we can make sure they’re prioritised. It’s proved to be a really good communication channel. It’s good for our EAs and PAs because they’re the ones that are getting the brunt of all these changes.
BTNE: Has landing the Travel Buyer of the Year award – and an ITM award earlier in the year – changed anything for you?
EFN: Well it’s certainly increased my profile. A lot of people have reached out to me and I’ve been invited to more meetings and events, and even receiving invitations to speak at events. It’s definitely helped increase my network. I also have some regular calls with other buyers now so we can discuss our challenges and share knowledge. Just talking through some of the problems that they may be having and seeing if there's anything that I've managed to do in Royal Mail that could help them, and vice versa. We all get something out of that. It’s very collaborative industry.