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Come Fly With Me?

Peter Wignall, Managing Director of the Workplace Travel Plan Company, advises of market segmentation in Travel Planning and states the case for building Travel Plans online.

As a new boy to this publication, I thought I might start with a quick resumé of the market place for Travel Planning (TP from now on) - from someone whose other job is as owner of a company which project manages business relocations. Yes, I am also a user from the sharp end!

Now, at the risk of upsetting some of the hard working folks in TP land, the market place is not particularly well developed or understood. If you doubt this, go to a meeting of your local Chamber of Commerce, Institute of Directors or CBI and watch folks glaze over as you try to explain what TP is about, and the relief when they know you don’t actually want to book their holidays.

So, why is this? Well simply, the market place is relatively new with all the characteristics of limited and variable capacity in both demand and supply. As we know, TP is not a mainstream or a widely accepted commercial business process. There is tremendous variability in the TP role at local authorities, and ‘traditional’ could be used to describe the consultancy market. I’ll let others debate whether costs are also an issue, especially for firms which wish to do TP on a voluntary basis. And, if we are all to be both honest and realistic, it is the market place for voluntary TP which needs to develop if a meaningful critical mass of modal shift is to be achieved.

The good news is times they are a changing. Politically the environment is becoming a vote winner, and there is an emerging consensus that something needs to be done to reduce congestion on the roads – with an increasing awareness of cost at both macro and micro levels. Various aspects of demand management are now appearing on all our radars, and Joe Public would really have to have been under the collective mushroom not to have heard of motorway tolling, Ken and his Congestion Charge, Rod and his Road Pricing and the many and various local schemes, be they park and rides, priority bus lanes, car share schemes etc. Transport Innovation Fund money is also giving some local authorities the scope to work up even more devilish schemes, and certainly from the local Tyneside press, it is easy to see that conditioning and managing public expectation is on the up in a big way.

So, if necessity is to become the mother of TP Invention in the larger market place, what is going to happen? Well as the School of the Patently Obvious advises, as demand increases so will supply driven by the mix of opportunity and entrepreneurship – with supply segmenting and taking on different forms.

One such ‘solution’ is our company’s online Travel Plan Builder (TPB), which is the product of two years development, and a local joint venture by the private and public sectors to develop the market place. This TPB product seeks to provide advice and support free to the occupier end user, with the local authority paying as part of its strategic responsibility. And, perish the thought of local authorities having Local Transport Plan targets to meet.

With the TPB, the customer gets the benefit of a financial incentive of low cost and a real time system operating over t’internet, on a 24/7 basis. At the same time, the local authority gets the ability to pro-actively promote TP and handle a significantly increased case load with the same number of people. Automating the process and standardising the approach promotes productivity and ease of assessment and comparison – with the added bonus of giving local authority staff more time to co-ordinate activity and deal with the more complex TP.

Now just before I feel a stabbing pain in the back, this does mean some of the existing players in the market are going to have to refocus towards higher value activity and look to their pricing. But don’t despair, the market place will grow to be large enough for all, in the same manner that the traditional airlines have had to sharpen their act to cope with the low cost carriers – who in turn, have had to learn to live with one another.

And finally, do I hear mutterings of dumbing down with the TPB? As you would expect my view is firmly ‘no’, for as we know there is no relationship between the cost of a TP and how much it is owned and developed by the user. In fact, it is likely the converse applies, as whilst Section 106 Agreements and Planning Conditions force compliance, it is those who undertake TP because they wish to who are the more likely to play the long game.

The market place for TP has a very long way to go; my analogy would be to look back 15 years at Investors in People and ISO and see where they are today as accepted and mainstream business processes, driven by commercial common sense and the requirements of procurement.

Whilst it may be a little while before our local business communities become familiar with the annual black tie TP awards dinner, I do think it is time we checked the wardrobe!

Peter Wignall · December 11, 2006

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