A travel management company transition can be difficult, but you can lessen the disruption with purposeful, smart decisions. 

You’ve decided it’s time to go about changing travel management companies. You may be a little apprehensive about taking the plunge. After all, implementing a new travel management company transition can seem intimidating. You’ve been doing things one way for so long, and now you’re switching things up. It’s a disruption for everyone involved, from leadership to individual Travelers.

Luckily, there are ways to make a travel management company transition go as smoothly as possible. With the right TMC change management—including a slow transition, transparent communication and Traveler involvement—you can ensure that the switch is successful. 

Key Takeaways 

• Engage Travelers and stakeholders in your change management plan.
• Keep communication throughout the travel management company transition consistent, clear and optimistic.
• Roll out your new travel program slowly and only to a select few Travelers at first.
• Gather data regarding the program’s effectiveness over time.
• Evaluate data after a year to determine if the TMC change has been effective.

Start with a Clear Change Management Plan

Travel program transition best practices begin with formulating a plan, involving key stakeholders and prioritizing clear and consistent communication.

Your plan for making the travel management company transition should be first and foremost based on your specific, defined goals for your travel program. Are you making the transition to save money? Because the new TMC has better tech and can potentially provide an improved Traveler experience?

As you create a change management plan, you might utilize one of several popular business change management methodologies, such as Kotter’s 8-Step Process, the McKinsey 7-S Framework or Kurt Lewin’s change model. Any of these can help you take a seemingly overwhelming change and boil it down to simple, succinct steps.

As you formulate your change management plan, bring in key internal stakeholders, such as Executive sponsors, anyone involved in Travel Management, HR and finance. 

Throughout the entire process, communicate often and clearly. Make sure your communication is centered around improvement. Don’t frame the change around disruption.

Studies have found that team members can be highly resistant to change due to factors such as organizational mistrust, lack of awareness around the need for change and fear of the unknown, but you can get around these issues by communicating early on and communicating with full transparency and honesty.

Engage Key Travelers Early

Don’t make the transition all at once. Instead, go with a slow rollout and involve a small pilot group of your frequent Travelers, right from the start. They can test-run new features, workflows and processes, providing feedback on what will work and what doesn’t. This way, you’re not rolling out new processes to your entire company that end up just not working and being changed in the long run.

Choose the Right Timing

Whether you’re rolling out the program to only a small number of Travelers or the entire company, choose the timing with extra care. You don’t want to make this transition during your busiest travel period of the year, or when you’re juggling travel surrounding a major event. 

Specifically, pick a slower (if not the slowest) travel period for the least amount of friction and potential issues possible. 

This gradual, slow approach will help your Travelers feel more comfortable and confident in the new processes, meaning that they’ll also be more policy-compliant.  

Test, Measure and Adapt

Consider the entire first year of your new processes and system to be a pilot phase. You don’t have to be completely married to the process that you’re using on day one.

Track data continuously throughout the year, on factors such as booking patterns, traveler satisfaction, policy compliance and support response times. You can then use this data to make small policy adjustments as needed. Again, make sure that any changes you make are incremental, slow, and simple. Don’t overcomplicate things or change too much, too quickly. 

Maintain Consistency and Communication

Over the adoption period, maintain consistent communication with your stakeholders and Travelers. Celebrate any small wins to encourage optimism regarding the change and the benefits it’s bringing. For example, reduced leakage, positive Traveler feedback, etc., are all worth sharing. Within your communications, also reaffirm the program’s overall goals and value. 

Review, Reflect and Evolve

At the end of the first year following your travel management company transition, it’s time to review, reflect and evolve. Review all of the data at your disposal, including adoption rate, spending trends and stakeholder and Traveler feedback. 

If you’ve determined that the transition has been successful, now might be the point that you would scale the new program company-wide, if you’ve yet to do so.

All the while, just as you’ve been keeping communication flowing with your stakeholders and Travelers, likewise keep communication open with your TMC, so they can assist you in continuously improving your travel program.

Change Doesn’t Have to Be Disruptive

A travel management company transition is a big change, but it doesn’t need to be cripplingly disruptive. Instead, view it as the next bright step in your travel program’s evolution. With careful pacing, collaboration and data-driven decisions, transitioning to a new TMC becomes an opportunity to improve your program’s performance.

Learn more about what you can expect when you transition to working with JTB Business Travel.

JTB Business Travel may reference reporting or research published by Northstar; however, all commentary and recommendations in this article are independently developed.