SAS - Travel Policy Generator

With ‘Travel Policy Generator’ we managed to get travel politician on the agenda

Challenge
Many larger companies have business travellers. But it is rarely themselves who book and buy tickets and the demands of comfort and flexibility do not get to the person who typically only looks at the price of the tickets. However, this is not always the best and most profitable solution for the company when they send their employees abroad.

Goal of the campaign

• To cover the situation and create understanding between the 2 parties, the 'flyers' and the 'buyers'
• To ensure that the company understands the value of a business-travel policy which guarantee the traveller favourable conditions and the travel-responsible thoughtful guidelines
• To get the business travellers to increasingly demand more flexible tickets
• To get the company to understand the higher and more direct price on the flexible tickets

Strategy
The starting point was to create dialogue between the two parties 'Buyers' and 'Flyers'. By launching a study of experiences and attitudes each party was given an opportunity to participate in an online survey at SAS' website. This resulted in two reports which referred to the two groups and included quotes from the other group to ensure mutual understanding. With the sought and important knowledge – and the interest that had been aroused in the companies – we went a step further and uniquely developed an online tool, the ‘Travel Policy Generator’, which the companies could use to easily develop a more varied, explicit and operational travel policy that perfectly fits to the terms, attitudes and culture of the respective company.

Results

• Involvement from relevant decisions-makers to discuss the cost and the appropriate use of time the travellers is spending on the journey itself
• Extra revenue from SAS amounts to a 3-digit million amount
• ROI over a period of one and a half year included both phases: 65.2 excl. Incentives and 27.5 incl. Incentives
• 48% gave the score 10 and 9 on a scale from 1-10 in connection to recommending Economy Extra after the campaign
• Participation was respectively 34% (out of approx. 50,000) for 'flyers' and 20% (out of approx. 2,000) for 'buyers'
• Reports from both 'flyers' and 'buyers' as well as the Travel Policy Generator provides plenty of information and data to use by PR activities, and for instance the Danish newspaper Jyllands Posten wrote an article about the needs of increased flexibility for business travellers and SAS' focus on this element