MK 412 Week 6 Discussion Question 2 Question 1 Travel Expenses Guidelines Hello Prof. Troutman & Class, Finding ways to cut all costs can be difficult, especially business travel expenses. Sales managers try to instill cost consciousness by establishing sales budgets that usually consider controllable travel expenses, such as food, hotels and air fare. In the Cost Analysis category, practices can be recommended to reduce traveling expenses. Reducing business travel expenses can save the company money, especially if employees can be motivated to do so. Some suggestions for reducing the costs incurred from traveling include: • Try to book flights in advance. Though it may be difficult to avoid last-minute business meetings that require traveling, booking flights in advance can save money on airline tickets. • Try not to …show more content…
Employees can then use these rewards for upgrades on future business travel or for his/her personal use. • Avoid “add-on” fees for airline tickets. Flying coach instead of business class, avoiding seat upgrades or preferred seating, and checked baggage fees, using Uber or Lyft instead of taxis to and from the airport can also save the company money (Morris, 2016). As the Vice-President of Sales, I would use these recommendations to cut the rising cost of traveling. Though business travel is often necessary to company operation, it can also have a significant impact on the company’s budget. It is estimated that for the average company, the traveling and expense budget is the second biggest expense after payroll (Ruch, 2016). Many employees will not or do not voluntarily consider ways to cut down on traveling expenses because the company is paying for the expenses. Therefore, management must find more innovative ways, such as a reward-based solution where the employee is given a percentage of the money saved by not overspending, to motivate them to want to save the company
Cost management plays a major role when maintaining profit margins. Management must be able to find in which areas of a business costs must be reduced and the consequences that such reductions have in the overall company. In some situations management must change the way the work is being done in order to decrease costs while in other cases changing one supplier for another might be enough, in both situations a tradeoff will occur and the consequences will impact the company as a whole.
Employers have been coming up with innovative employee rewards to boost morale and acknowledge employee needs for creativity and personal goal accomplishment. Some of the latest potential employee rewards include using the internet at work for personal reasons such as shopping, communicating with friends, or personal finances; bringing a pet to work; instituting a controlled napping policy, and the sports and office betting pools..
Increase the utilization of the resources (planes, employees, gate space). They optimized the operational logistics and activities to give more operational hours and hence increasing the volume again. Employee working hour policies were changed to reduce overheads by eliminating hotel stays for flight attendants
Spirit addresses “price” by attempting to get the lowest possible fair for their potential customers. They have instituted their “unbundling” strategy that essentially removes all the conveniences that other airlines afford. Fees for checked bags, fees for flight changes, and no complementary in-flight beverages are just a few of the cost-trimming techniques employed. This strategy allows Spirit to come up with impossibly low fares. It also conforms to customers who just want to get from point A to point B without paying extra for services they don’t use. This strategy, coupled with an in-your-face “promotion” ploy, has made Spirit Airlines “the most profitable airline in the U.S.” (Nicas, 2012).
Having a low amount of cost in their operations is one of the contributing factors in Southwest Airlines’ financial success. Such low cost model of the corporation is brought about by an effective strategy. Southwest uses only one type of aircraft – the fuel-efficient Boeing 737. This tactic keeps training and maintenance costs down. Moreover, the no-frills approach to customer service contributed to the low cost of operations for Southwest. The airline does not serve meals on board, and there are no luxurious or first class seats offered. Services like these have been seen by the airline as unnecessary for an airline that provides a short-haul trip from city to city. By these, Southwest were able to offer low price tickets to customers, which was good for the company because most people would prefer to fly without those services mentioned if it meant for cheaper ticket price.
A switch from premium overnight services to lower – margin deferred services and ground delivery services is an advantage to Airborne Express. With existing assets including trucks, tracking systems, regional hubs and sorting facilities, they only need minor initial investments to develop fully these kinds of services. They should use these assets wisely and effectively.
Before to select the proper alternative, three alternatives were analysed and evaluated under four decisions criteria: customer experience, cost, growth rate / market penetration and ease to implementation (See Exhibit 2: Factor Analysis). Between all the alternatives, it was suggested that Southwest Airlines enters to New York City by bidding the slots and gates at the LGA (See Exhibit 3: Alternatives Analysis). This alternative sustains the challenge of changing the customer experience which means adding more flights from and to the East; furthermore, entering to new markets will reinforce “the power of the network” through LGA. At the same time, this decision will allow signing more code-sharing agreements with other airlines flying to international destinations and offer new products and services to LUV customers as loyalty rewards, in-flight internet, onboard duty-free purchases, etc.; as a result of this, it will increase passenger’s insights and experiences by flying with Southwest Airlines. Nevertheless, there is potential risk by selecting this alternative, in the recent years the energy prices has had a huge increase affecting costs, fares and even capacity needed, however Southwest Airlines has been able to hedge fuel for decad...
Airline and travel industry profitability has been strapped by a series of events starting with a recession in business travel after the dotcom bust, followed by 9/11, the SARS epidemic, the Iraq wars, rising aviation turbine fuel prices, and the challenge from low-cost carriers. (Narayan Pandit, 2005) The fallout from rising fuel prices has been so extreme that any efficiency gains that airlines attempted to make could not make up for structural problems where labor costs remained high and low cost competition had continued to drive down yields or average fares at leading hub airports. In the last decade, US airlines alone had a yearly average of net losses of $9.1 billion (Coombs, 2011).
This is due to continually having to continually update their training and knowledge. Motivating these employees is challenging for management and supervisors. Many times, supervisors permit these employees autonomy to follow their interests and allow them to structure the workload in ways that makes them most productive. Rewarding the professional and technical employees is done by providing them with educational opportunities, like attending conferences, increased training in more specified areas, and workshops. These rewards enable the employees to network with their peers and keep updated with the current trends in their area of specialty.
Considering the Atlas corporate card programs, we found that cards were divided between two suppliers and were not disseminated to all travelers. Additionally, the contract with one of those suppliers was quite old and in need of renegotiation. As card programs have changed over the years of this agreement, it was the perfect time to revamp our thinking as to how the program should work and how we could make it easier for our employees to use. With that in mind, we put together a team including representatives from procurement, finance, audit services, and information technology. The team formulated objectives for the project which included securing higher rebates on dollars spent, leveraging card spend for improved travel discounts, reinventing expense reimbursement efficiencies, reducing expense report fraud and identifying travel program inefficiencies. In addition, we were exploring the possibilities of credit
And of course, as I mentioned, check the individual airline websites as well. Fares are always changing, remember to try different times of the day and different days too. You can use a travel agent at a physical location (as opposed to online) to help you look for deals on hotels, rental cars, etc. Often they have package deals available that can save you a bundle.
Wilson, T. B. (1999). Rewards that drive high performance. Retrieved online February 18, 2007, from: http://www.wilsongroup.com/ecr/case/SouthwestAirlines.pdf.
Also, the rewards program is based off a point system and when one has earned a certain amount of points they send them a gift card to spend however they wish. Though, what the consumers don’t know is that by applying for their free rewards program, they are collecting data and constructing analysis to make them into loyal consumers.
How is this possible, you ask. Aren’t charter flights expensive? They are, if you are travelling alone. But why not gather up your friends and split the cost among you? You will not just be able to pay less than what commercial flights usually cost; you will also have a great time with your friends.
Fly cheap with cheap usa flight Flight tickets can be quite expensive and it is a fact, the costs that are associated with the ticket as well as the services that are provided tend to make an impact on the prices and there are many people out there who tend to pay quite a lot to travel by air, however, this is not something that always needs to be the case, there are flight tickets available in the cheap too. This has been made possible to the high number of low cost carriers that provide the basic services to the customers and they help in giving cheap prices to the customers, however, high demand can drive up the prices and this is when cheap usa flights can help the customers in finding the best prices for a flight they might be looking