Joel of Pearl Corporate Travel Solutions objectives are aligned to our overall company vision of creating & operating businesses that are focused, highly differentiated and offer our customers best-in-class products, high quality service and excellent value for money!
Consistent with the above, our specialised corporate travel solutions have been christened TravelValueAdd. It represents our expertise in areas which are either ignored or treated as a low priority in the usual Travel Management regime but represent significant, unrealised potential for direct and indirect cost savings, improved controls & enhanced customer satisfaction.
The highly differentiated TravelValueAdd offerings are backed by solid subject matter expertise in the travel domain. Our leadership has over 75 years of combined experience acquired across the travel industry in a variety of operational, customer service and strategic roles with leading global organisations.
Our demonstrated domain expertise enables us to identify issues and opportunities with dexterity and accuracy, make pragmatic and effective recommendations, as well work with clients to implement solutions and deliver tangible outcomes.
Importantly, we are able to work across the entire corporate travel value chain, with buyers, suppliers as well as intermediaries across multiple geographies.
Following is a summary of the key TravelValueAdd service suite:
Refund Appraisal & Administration Services or RAARS, represents three principal delivery areas covering the entire end to end Refund process:
Refund Audit : Broken processes and inadequate controls in the travel procurement and expense reporting process results in instances where good for refund tickets are 'lost or misplaced'. These tickets are either not submitted for refund or the residual value on cancelled / re-issued tickets remains unrecognised.
Our experience and research has confirmed that the loss on account of such transactions to organisations and travel intermediaries can be significant, ranging from between 1 - 2% of total air ticket spend.
Joel of Pearl has developed the capability to identify such 'lost' tickets where refundable value can be claimed from airlines. We work on a success fees basis, where we seek a gain share on the value of the refund recovered from the Airline.
Refund Computation : Joel of Pearl has the expertise to calculate refundable value on fully or partially unutilised air tickets covering fares, taxes and other charges. Our fares experts have extensive experience and formal training in airline fares and ticketing.
Refund Submission, Tracking & Claim processing : In the last but extremely important phase of the process, Joel of Pearl offers the capability to organize and submit airline refunds, and a robust process to track pending cases till logical closure viz. recovery of refund value.
Please refer to Case Study 1 in the following section outlining Joel of Pearl Corporate Travel Solutions client engagement relating to RAARS.
Supplier Management Services or SMS, Joel of Pearl offers assistance with the end to end supplier management process, with particular focus on airline suppliers.
We provide assistance with identifying preferred suppliers based on travel patterns, travel policy & cost management objectives. We realise that although there are multiple options for companies and Agencies to track and report supplier performance, there exists a discernible gap in the manner in which available information is utilized and translated into tangible benefit.
Joel of Pearl has deep and extensive domain experience in helping clients derive maximum value from supplier leverage. We help Travel Managers interpret and action MIS and negotiate best ROI from the suppliers covering direct spend and productivity linked benefits.
As part of our TravelValueAdd, we also provide Fare Audit Services or FAS to help ticket itineraries on best available air fares and realize real time savings.
Please refer to Case Study 2 & Case Study 3 in the following section illustrating our proven capabilities in these key area.
Joel of Pearl is also fully equipped and experienced to handle all the core travel requirements of a business traveller including International / Domestic Air travel, Hotel accommodation, visa / passport services, airport transfers, car rentals et al.
Joel of Pearl Corporate Travel Solutions helped streamline the Airlines Refund Administration process and delivered significant savings to a large Corporate Travel Agency by deploying its specialized expertise RAARS - Refund Appraisal & Administration Services.
A reputed Indian Corporate Travel Agency with an annual turnover of over US $ 35 million across ten IATA locations with centralized back office accounting was facing major issues with Airline refunds. There were delays in processing of Airline refunds to the customer which was leading to high customer dissatisfaction. In several cases, customers had begun deducting the refunds due to them from payments made to the Agency leading to working capital issues for the Agency.
Joel of Pearl Travel Solutions was engaged by the Travel Agency to conduct a diagnostic to identify the root causes and recommend a solution to overcome the issues.
We conducted a detailed review of the refund process and determined that insufficient controls, sub-optimal processes/inadequate process documentation and training gaps at both the client and Agency end were leading to delays in submission and claim of refunds from air suppliers.
As many as 25% of unutilized tickets either became time barred or were never identified and submitted for Refund. We estimated that between 1 - 1.5% of the total ticket sales were being lost as a result of the existing issues.
Joel of Pearl recommended and helped implement a series of measures ranging from process improvements, strengthening controls and staff training. We also deployed our acquired expertise to specifically identify air tickets with refundable value that were lost or not identified as part of the existing expense reporting and refund administration processes.
Joel of Pearl engagement model was based on a 'gain share' approach with the Agency paying a success fees only on the value of the actual refund realized from the airline supplier.
Our engagement with the client resulted in a one time savings of US $ 330K for the Agency and its clients and ongoing annual savings of over US $ 120K, in addition to enhanced controls & compliance and client satisfaction.
Joel of Pearl Corporate Travel Solutions brought to play its deep airline domain knowledge to significantly improve the ROI on air sales and increase re-seller loyalty for a leading Consolidator Agency with over US $ 300 million in annual air ticket sales.
This large and rapidly growing Consolidator Agency had been facing challenges with managing their PLB commitments with Airlines, with incentive outgoings to re-seller agents exceeding incentive receipts from airline suppliers. The consolidator was also facing pressure of unrealistic increase in Q-on-Q revenue targets being demanded by Airlines for following years.
This was resulting in a significant adverse impact on the Consolidators ongoing business profitability.
Joel of Pearl Solutions conducted a detailed analysis of the ticketed revenue and the resulting receipt of flown revenue of various Airlines. We were able to determine a noticeable and varying time lag between ticketed and flown revenue basis which airlines were settling PLB payments to the Consolidator. We also determined that the Consolidator Agency was overpaying re-sellers on account of the above timing mismatch.
Joel of Pearl implemented a model to forecast flown revenue based on our domain knowledge of airline fare structures and proration techniques. This enabled the Consolidator Agency to forecast, to a reasonably high degree of accuracy, the expected receipt of flown revenue throughout the year. This further enabled the Consolidator Agency to accurately measure re-seller performance and make incentive pay-outs accordingly.
With accurate performance data at hand, the Consolidator Agency was able more effectively handle revenue target negotiations and improve probability of meeting and exceeding revenue targets, leading to improved and deeper relationship with airline suppliers.
Most importantly, Joel of Pearl was able to deliver an increase of 1.6% (approx. 22%) of net airline revenue receipts by the Consolidator from Airline suppliers.
Joel of Pearl Corporate Travel Solutions was able to help a large & growing Indian multinational to successfully reduce their annual air fare spend by up to 15%.
A leading & fast growing Indian IT services provider with 3000 employees across 15 operating locations globally, was noticing an increase in their air travel spend of USS $ 15 million despite strict restrictions on business travel. This trend was in the backdrop an unfavourable economic environment and increasing competition resulting in pressure on the Company revenues and margins.
Joel of Pearl Travel Solutions was invited by the Company CFO to identify the root cause and recommend solutions to better control their travel budgets, with focus on air travel.
In the ensuing engagement, we conducted a detailed review of the end to end airline booking process and policy. Other than reviewing historical airline booking and ticketing data for a 12 month period, we also set-up a live process wherein all international air bookings were routed to Joel of Pearl Fare Desk for review and application of the best available pricing prior to ticketing.
Joel of Pearl Travel Solutions Travel domain experts were able to identify three principal causes for the inordinate increase in air travel spending:
a) non-application of negotiated fares by the nominated Travel Agent
b) non-utilisation of best available fares consistently at the time of ticketing and,
c) delays in ticketing from time of internal TA approval leading to application of higher fares.
We worked with the Company and their nominated Travel Agent to improve the internal and cross over processes in order to reduce time elapsed between travel approvals and ticketing. We set-up a robust process to ensure that 100% reservations were validated for best available fare prior to ticketing. We also supported the Company in obtaining better negotiated fares from airlines based on objective data and useful competitive information.
Joel of Pearl Travel Solutions was able to help the Company reduce their international air fare spend by over 10% in spite of a 15% increase in the number of international air trips.
We offer different engagement models depending on client situation and needs.
We can deploy resources on client premises to manage identified processes or manage the services from our centralised Operations location.
Our pricing is flexible depending on client requirement and nature of the process. We offer transaction or outcome based pricing or FTE based pricing options. We also offer products that are based on a success fees model where the client pays a share of the actual realised gain.
Joel of Pearl Corporate Solutions also provides assistance in process improvements, documentation, change management, training to client organizations.
We deploy robust Governance processes that ensure deliverables are identified and agreed with the client in advance. We provide useful & timely MIS covering various stages of the engagement and / or the managed process, and engage in regular / fact based reviews with the client.