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Our Top Tips to Reduce Workforce Travel Challenges

Oct 15, 2024

Customer Success Manager, Carla Jones, reflects on how companies can reduce time and money spent on crew travel

The Challenges:

Manual processes bog down the machine: With a previous company, Jones had up to 5,000 people travelling at any given moment over six locations. It took an entire team, complicated spreadsheets, and countless hours for her time to ensure people had the right accommodation.
Problems grow exponentially: “If you compound that to 150 travellers, you now have 150 bookings in a spreadsheet that you're manually tracking. There's no platform on a hotel search engine to consolidate and view all of your individual bookings and easily change them.”
Communications breakdown: With employees, subcontractors, and ever-changing schedules, it’s difficult to stay nimble. Jones has seen countless instances where a minor crew or schedule change results in a flood of bookings concentrated in one area and has even seen cases of crews sleeping in their vehicles. It’s when the adage of ‘first come, first serve’ comes into play.
Paying more than you need to: When staff are making their own bookings, rates can vary wildly and can make it difficult to stick to budgets. Cost certainty goes out the window.
Booking search engines isn’t the complete answer: “We have some customers who use booking search engines, and they say, ‘Oh, I just book using search engines because they get the best price.’ The thing with the search engines is you're locked into that booking. It's very difficult to get a hold of them to make a change, to edit a booking. If you book for ten days, you're charged for ten days.”

Jones suggests the following considerations if you’re handling multiple crews going to different locations:

With multiple people in one room, knowing exactly the names and room numbers of each person is critical to understanding if the room was used and that staff arrived safely.

The hospitality industry constantly deals with the ups-and-downs of room demand and subsequent availability. Mapping out those seasonal requirements in all locations and then planning accordingly will ensure there aren’t room shortages.

What can happen will happen. Room cancellations and schedule changes are all part of the job. Having a roster of accommodations and transportation companies in specific locations and having established relationships with them can make it easier to facilitate requests.

Whether it’s individuals paying or the vendor billing back to the company, ensuring everyone is getting paid accurately can become difficult to track as crews grow. Having ironclad processes and procedures that everyone understands is time-consuming but critical to staying on budget.

How LodgeLink can help

About seven years ago, Jones went from manually planning crew travel to helping LodgeLink develop a platform that can drastically reduce the head and heartaches involved in crew travel planning.

“I've worked with our parent company, Black Diamond Group, for 14 years, and then I got a call from one of my old bosses and said, ‘Hey, we have an idea. We're not sure if it's going to work. But we would like to try it out and we think you're the person that can help us get it kicked off’,” she reminisces.

“I came over and the idea was instead of building and operating camps, we wanted to rent the individual rooms of camps, and we were calling it LodgeLink. And we quickly realized that LodgeLink was not only lodges, it was going to be hotels as well because our customers had mid-point stops. They weren't just going to one destination.”

iPad displaying LodgeLink booking hotels page and savings.

Since then, LodgeLink has grown well beyond that original vision. With the help of Jones, her team, and the nearly 100-person team at LodgeLink, she’s seen how the platform can greatly help companies make the intricacies of workforce travel much simpler:

Price certainty: Through LodgeLink’s bulk buying power, rates are already negotiated and concrete. “(Companies) are all getting different rates because they didn't negotiate their own rates. Whereas if one company pays, we negotiate the rate for you. Everyone gets the same rate and they all book through LodgeLink,” says Jones. “You get all the visibility of everyone who stayed. You get your cost efficiency, you get your negotiated rate, and you can repeat the project later on with the exact numbers of people you had over that period of time to do that specific job.”
Doing things automatically, not manually: LodgeLink’s platform empowers administrators to go into the platform and make bookings. You can share responsibilities with multiple people, and they can all have access to the same information in reporting. You can see who, where and when people have booked making it easier to forecast the months ahead. It eliminates the horrors of sifting through multiple spreadsheets.
Speaking with an actual human being: LodgeLink has a 24/7 team to meet all reservations needs as an additional tool to the platform’s self-serve portal.
Better reporting, happier bosses: With all travel-related expenses tracked under one roof, data can be easily viewed and exported so you can confidently understand what was spent in any period of time.
More options: Access to over 15,000 partner properties and 1 million rooms in Canada and the United States.