The importance of change management. No matter what type of change is being implemented at your company, change management conversations ensure that your employees are on board with what you’re about to put into place. If you’ve been part of a technology rollout at your company, you probably have some ideas of what works well for your employees and what may not work. But when it comes to travel, from my experience, there tends to be a lot of opinions from travelers ranging from, “This will be great to be booking on this platform,” to, “I want to keep doing it my way.” So how can we get everybody on board with it?

We’re going to want to start by preparing a statement and make sure we’re keeping our message consistent. So how do we start with this? When you’re first introducing TravelBank to your employees, the earlier, the better. If they’re prepared for an upcoming change, they’ll be more open to it When the time comes to learn the new system.

It’s also going to be very beneficial to make sure they know why you chose TravelBank to partner with for travel and, of course, what’s in it for them. Since we know that travelers tend to have strong preferences on how they book, we want to make sure they are just as happy booking on TravelBank as they were previously. So it’ll be important to highlight these benefits to your travelers to drive high adoption of your new travel program. We also want to make sure that your admins of TravelBank know exactly what’s in it for them, too. It’ll be important that they know that they’re going to get time back in their day by using TravelBank.

So once you prepare this message, let’s really start talking about those benefits of TravelBank. These three sections will be helpful for both your travelers and your admins. First, let’s talk about maximizing productivity. You’ll be able to build travel policies right into TravelBank and automate the approval flows. Employees will have control over their own travel while knowing what is in policy without extra effort. This at the end of the day will give your admins time back so they won’t have to be reaching out to travelers directly, approving travel for them. Everything can be done directly in the app. It’ll also help so your travelers are not asking a bunch of questions about the policy since it will be built right in TravelBank for them.

Everyone’s going to have better visibility. Admins can access travel reporting to aid and duty of care and identify travel trends, while your employees can instantly access all their travel bookings in one place. It’s a win-win for both.

Then an improved experience. You will have a dedicated team of travel agents that can access your travel records and support you 24/7. That will be over chat, phone, or email if any travel issues arise. Or if there needs to be any changes, they’ll have the full support of our certified travel agents.

We really want to focus on what the benefits are to your travelers, this way you can share this with them and get them very excited about the change. The first is going to be letting them manage their account profile. They’ll be able to save their profile information directly within their account. What this will do, it will just make booking more efficient. They will not have to add in their birthdate, TSA number, passport information, or any loyalty programs each time they book. They’ll add it in once and then it will store and apply to all future bookings.

They’ll also be able to add in a payment method. So maybe you let your travelers book on their own card so they can get the perks from their personal credit card. None of that’s going to change by booking through TravelBank. They’ll still be able to put in that personal card. If you do require them to book on a corporate card so you all at the company can get the perks of your corporate card, that won’t change either. We can put a ghost card on file so everybody can book their flights and prepaid hotels on it, that way you will continue to get all of the points that you typically would even prior to them booking on TravelBank.

Creating travel bookings has never been easier. Through TravelBank, your travelers and your travel bookers will be able to access over 1 million hotel options, book flights, and reserve cars. If you have a company-specific rate with any hotels, they’re going to be able to book that directly in app as well and any specialty rates that TravelBank or you might have. If there is a need to modify or cancel flights, your travelers will be able to do that in app and then access any available flight credits from those canceled flights.

As admins, you will be able to see what flights have been canceled and that they do have credit on, so you can make sure Travelers are using those credits for their next trip, and that way it will save the company money.

We touched on this a little bit, but there will be live agent support available 24/7. This is truly one of the best benefits to your travelers. Travel is unpredictable. You never know what may happen if you need to make last-minute change, cancellations. Especially in a business setting, it tends to change more often. When booking through TravelBank, travelers no longer need to call the airline, the hotel, and the car rental agencies to separately make changes. They can just utilize our 24/7 travel agents to assist with every element of their trip in one place, or they can simply change or cancel their travel directly in the TravelBank app.

Want to be sure that your travelers download our mobile app as well. That way they can not only book their travel and view their upcoming trips but they can chat with our agents when they are on the road through the mobile app.

Want to make sure that your travelers all save this phone number as well and the email. They can find this phone number directly within the app, but can be helpful just to have it stored right in their cell phone.

Is your company using TravelBank Rewards? If so, another very big perk that we want to let your travelers know about. One of the best ways to drive high adoption of your travel program is to enable TravelBank Rewards. You can choose to reward your travelers directly for spending less money when they book a hotel stay. What will happen then is they will earn TravelBank Rewards for each dollar they go under budget when booking a hotel and can redeem them later on gift cards in our rewards store. If you’re not using TravelBank Rewards, not a problem. It can always be turned on later if you choose. If you choose to never turn it on, your travelers will never know what they’re missing, but definitely something to consider. They also redeem with no tax implications if that’s a worry of yours. But as you can see, they can get rewards for Uber gift cards, Amazon, Airbnb, DoorDash, StubHub. There’s quite a few in here that will be accessible to them.

So once again, if you are using TravelBank Rewards, make sure your travelers know exactly what this is because it’s an awesome benefit for them and they’ll get rewarded by booking under bigger hotel policy. So once again, it’s a win-win for you. The company will save money and the travelers get some rewards back in their pocket.

Now that your travelers know exactly what’s in it for them, coaching is going to be crucial internally. It’ll help you get ahead of any problems before they arise. We want to remember that the success of this rollout relies on changing old habits by understanding the new system.

So when we start thinking about coaching and preparing for change, let’s first talk about admins. As admins, you’ve typically gone through the coaching through the implementation process, but as you set up new admins into the system, you want to make sure that they also get the proper coaching. So, all admins need to understand the nuances of your travel policy. They should understand how to set up managers and all the various settings within TravelBank. If there is a change to your policy, make sure that they know exactly how to reflect that in TravelBank.

Admin should be providing managers and employees the travel policy as well. This is going to be a very, very big piece. If everybody has it documented, there will be less questions coming to you. Admin should also be coached on how to assign delegates and to train them on the policy variations. So if you have somebody, for example, an executive assistant booking for an executive, it will make sense to make them a delegate and just train them on exactly how to book as a delegate and make sure that they understand the different policies if they are supporting a few people.

Admin should also be prepared to answer internal questions. While TravelBank is of course the technology that people will be booking travel through and how the policy will be built out, all of that is the tech side of it, but there will still be some questions that people need to come to you internally for. So just making sure that you feel very equipped with not only how to use TravelBank, but what your travel policy is and who is responsible for answering these questions.

It’s going to be very important to coach your managers as well. Your managers are going to be your biggest asset, as they’re going to be the middle point between admins and your travelers. For example, if your travel policy requires manager approval, you’re going to want to make sure every single manager understands the policies, the approval workflow, and then also to have them know what to do if a booking is out of policy when they should definitely deny it and when it’s okay to be out of policy.

Sometimes people have to book last minute. Maybe your policy says they need to book within seven days of the trip, but they just found out they need to go to visit a client tomorrow. Making sure your managers know that situations like that are okay to book out of policy versus maybe somebody is just booking the more expensive trip because they don’t want to wake up at 6:00 AM versus waking up at 7:00 AM and knowing that maybe that’s not the time to approve an out-of-policy booking. So, just making sure your managers are aware of that.

And make sure they understand their role and responsibility for timely travel approvals. So once a trip goes for approval out to the manager, we are unable to ticket that until the manager approves the trip. So making sure that they know when they’re getting an email from TravelBank, that alert is going to be something that they want to look at quickly. The email is typically for a reason, and that reason is typically to approve a flight, or a hotel, or a car. Just make sure that they review this in a timely manner to avoid any hiccups.

And we, of course, want to coach your travelers on how to use TravelBank, what the travel policy is. As I mentioned, make sure that they have a copy of the document and travel policy. It’s very important that they understand that while TravelBank, once again, is the platform they’ll be booking on, their booking choices are still dictated by the travel policy that you all have built out. If they have questions on the policy, they need to know exactly who to go to internally, so going back to admins being prepared to answer internal questions.

Then, it’s going to be very important to walk them through or offer them training guides on how to book. This should include what the different rate types are and classes of service, so, for example, making sure that they know if what the prepaid versus paid the hotel rates means, loyalty versus non-loyalty eligible hotel rates, and if you have anything in the policy that states that they need to book the prepaid versus pay at the hotel.

We also want to make sure if you have chosen to keep basic economy flights turned off so that lowest class on, say, United, American, Delta basic economy, a lot of companies choose to keep those turned off just because they end up being a little bit more expensive with all the extra fees. So if you have that off, make sure your travelers know that that’s why they aren’t seeing basic economy.

We also want to reiterate a few times to utilize TravelBank agents when they need assistance. What that’s going to do, it’s going to give you personally time back in your day since you won’t need to handle any of their reservation questions. Let our certified travel agents step in here to help.

So while we’ve talked about what’s in it for your travelers, we also want to start thinking about what the common objections are that you might be hearing. This way you can get ahead of most of the common objections that you’re going to hear so you educate everybody from the beginning.

The first is basic economy. We just talked a little bit about that. But if your company has chosen to not show basic economy, which, as I mentioned, a lot of companies choose not to just because it is more restrictive, pricing might look a little bit higher than if they’re searching on, say, Google Flights. Sites like Google Flights and Kayak will show basic economy as the cheapest option. But if you have basic economy turned off, we’re going to start showing your travelers’ pricing at main cabin economy as the lowest option, which will ultimately make your travelers think our pricing’s a little bit higher. So just be sure that your travelers know that you chose to remove basic economy flights, and that will be the difference in that lowest price that they might be seeing on, say, Kayak versus TravelBank.

Next is hotel loyalty points. Here at TravelBank we are fortunate to have different types of hotel rates coming from partners like Expedia and hotels directly. However, there are times when hotel rates are not loyal to be eligible and the trade-off of that is typically their lower price.

So when selecting a hotel, we always surface if the hotel rates they are viewing are loyalty eligible or not. So if you hear travelers commenting on not getting their loyalty points, make sure that they know that they need to select a loyalty-eligible rate. As I mentioned, that will be shown right at the time of booking. They’ll be able to see loyalty eligible, and then they’ll be able to get those points. But just knowing that there are some hotel rooms that might not be loyalty eligible.

Similar to basic economy, we’re going to want to highlight how travel sites each show pricing a little bit differently. If you hear that travelers are commenting that TravelBank pricing looks different than what they might be seeing on, say, Southwest, we want to make sure that they are comparing the pricing at final checkout versus at outbound flight selection.

For example, Southwest will show their outbound flight at $150. You select that. You go to select your return flight at $200. Once you select both, it’s going to say your flight totals $350. Versus with TravelBank, when you’re going in and you’re selecting your outbound flight, we’re going to show an estimated round trip cost at the selection of outbound just so you don’t get that sticker shock once you get to the checkout. So, always making sure if people are looking on different websites that they’re comparing that final price, not that first selection price. Also, of course, back to basic economy, if you have that turned off, making sure they are comparing the same class of service.

The final and possibly most common objection we hear is how travelers want to book on their preferred airline app. They’ve gotten used to just opening up their Delta app and booking a flight. So we want to be sure that travelers know to download our mobile app. By using our mobile app, they will have a very similar experience from being able to book directly on their phone. They’re still going to get their flight loyalty points once they get that loaded into their account. We’re not going to take away perks like seat upgrades. We pass all of their info along to the airline as far as their loyalty number, which their status is linked to. And make sure that they know that they’ll have access to our 24/7 agents that will know your company’s policies inside and out. So while they may be used to booking on their preferred vendor app directly, TravelBank is not going to take that away. They can still book directly on their phone, but they’ll just be able to book all in one.

So with these common objections, once again, we want to get ahead of this. Make sure you touch on these with your travelers. So if they see something pop up and it’s maybe around hotel loyalty points, they’ve already had that conversation and know what to expect.

We’ve talked a lot now about the benefits to travelers, to admins, the objections, excuse me, and as well as the coaching. There is a lot of information, but how do we communicate all of this to your employees? As we discussed, your travelers will have their own preferences, and chances are they’re going to voice these to you. I’m sure you already have some employees popping into your mind that you expect to hear from. Every single company does. So one thing to remember as an admin is their preferences probably don’t always align with your company policy, which is why you all came to TravelBank. So it’s going to be really important to communicate the change to TravelBank is a mandatory part of the company policy.

So how do we do this? From the top down. Rollouts are most successful when the communications comes from the top down. The most common pushback we see is habit based. You may hear from employees that, “It’s easier to do this on my own directly with airline.” And at first, that will be true as employees are still learning how to use TravelBank. However, if you don’t mandate the program, the kind of pushback from employees can lead to detractors never using TravelBank, which means less policy and compliance and more risk for your business.

You’re also going to want to set a date. So set a date for when it is required to start using TravelBank. If you are coming to TravelBank from another travel management company, everyone needs to know the exact date to stop booking on that travel site and start booking at TravelBank. Be sure to communicate with them how to use any unused credits with the previous travel management company. That travel management company will be able to guide you through it, so be sure you ask them how to use those unused credits.

If you’re coming to TravelBank from an unmanaged solution, your travelers have been booking however they want, you also need to set a date on when it’s expected to start booking through TravelBank. Let them know that if they do not book through TravelBank starting on that date, their travel may not be refunded. If it’s on a personal card, travel might not be authorized. Whatever makes sense for your company, but just letting them know it’s expected that they start booking on TravelBank on X date and that it is mandated.

We’ve touched on travel policy a little bit already, but this will be crucial to have policy enforcement as well. One of the biggest assets of TravelBank to a company is being able to enforce your policy through control set within TravelBank. However, travelers need to know what that policy is. So when we think about the key communication here, be sure to share a written document that is created by your company on the policy with all travelers and share it with all travelers, and this will eliminate questions.

Also, be sure to let them know how out-of-policy bookings will be handled, telling them that their out-of-policy bookings will go to their manager for approval, the manager will approve or deny, and then they’ll be alerted to find a new trip if necessary if it is denied. But once again, sharing that written document with them of the travel policy. If today you don’t have a travel policy, TravelBank reporting will be able to help you with this, being able to see some trends on exactly what they’re booking, knowing how far in advance people are booking, typical price, things like that. The travel policy, of course, can always be created and it can always be adapted as well.

Written communication will be big, so put everything in writing. You’re going to want to send out a memo to each traveler and one that will be used for new travelers as they join your company explaining what TravelBank is, what the policy is, the date they need to start booking on TravelBank, as well as resources available to them to learn the system. Those will be training videos that you may have, user guides that TravelBank will send you at the end of implementation, office hours that are hosted by our customer success team. All this information will be available to you to share with your travelers.

Within this written communication, these are all the points along with the why statement and benefits we spoke about earlier, which can be rolled into a master Frequently Asked Questions document employees can always refer back to. While written communication is going to be very important, so is in-person communication. So for those that may have missed the written communication, reinforce everything in an in-person meeting. This could be done on an all-hands meeting with the full company or maybe a team meeting run by their manager. At the end of the day, it’s better to over-communicate this change to be sure there’s no way anyone missed it.

We also want to share resources with your travelers. We touched on this a little bit with the written communication, but you received user guides, support articles, contact information for the support team and travel agents during implementation. Make sure everybody has this. You also want to make sure that they know who their internal resources are. Who are they supposed to go to for policy questions? If they have a question on, “Can I take this trip?” who should they be going to for that? So while it’s going to be very important to give them the TravelBank resources, it’s also going to be just important to give them the internal resources, so another document that you will create to share with them.

The biggest takeaway here when we think about communication should be to feel like you’re oversharing. Travel tends to bring out a lot of opinions in people, good or bad. We’ve all heard it firsthand, whether it be from your spouse, parent, or your seatmate on the plane if something has gone wrong with their trip. So let your travelers know exactly why they’re being mandated to use TravelBank, and it’s going to reduce pushback and it’s of course going to reduce questions for you.

As you will be creating your internal resources document, so, like we talked about, who they should be going to, we want to make sure everybody has their TravelBank resources. We’ve talked about it, but we have our 24/7 travel agents. They are available via chat. You can email them, reservations@travelbank.com, or you can call them.

Our support team. So our support team is here if you’re running into any challenges with the app or you just have questions about functionality of the app of how to book something. You can either go to support.travelbank.com, and this is our Frequently Asked Questions page. You can chat in with them or you can email support@travelbank.com. The travel agents, of course, will be the ones that you want to go to for any questions about your trip. But once again, support will be there if you have maybe some functionality questions.

Then, as admins, you might have your dedicated customer success manager or you can email success@travelbank.com. And just if you have any questions about your setup or anything of the sort, utilize the customer success team. Your end users and travelers, though, should be directed to our support team or travel agents, so just keep that in mind.

But, thank you, everybody, for taking the time to talk through change management with us today. Definitely very excited to see you and your travelers on TravelBank. But once again, if you have any questions, please utilize our agents, our support team, or customer success team. Thank you.