How Ampa enhances travel reporting and policy with TravelPerk
Ampa: UK’s leading group of legal and professional service companies
The importance of in-person interactions for Ampa’s success
Facing the challenges of travel coordination
- Inefficient expense management: The process of handling expense claims was cumbersome and time-consuming. The workload for the financial team was immense. PAs were also manually negotiating with individual hotels, and there was no standardised way of sharing this information across the businesses.
- Lack of spend control and transparency: Without a centralised travel management system, there was a lack of rules and boundaries on how employees could travel, how much they were allowed to spend in which situations, and when to prioritise sustainable options. This led to varied spending habits across the group.
- Inconsistent travel policies and reporting: Ampa’s brands operated independently in booking travel, making it challenging to standardise travel policies and consolidate streamlined data on travel activities. This decentralised structure limited Ampa's ability to gather detailed reports and actionable insights.
Comprehensive control and freedom with TravelPerk
[The main value of the platform] is in understanding our costs, the duty of care for our people – knowing where they are, in case there’s an emergency – and the data: that’s powerful, knowing that detail about people’s behaviours. That knowledge gives us the power to figure out what we’ve got to do next to save a bit more money or improve the experience for our people. […] It’s also giving people the power to manage their travel themselves and making it easy for them.
Nancy McArtney SmithService excellence manager, Ampa
Transparency that builds trust
Actionable insights
- Policy decision making: It had been previously assumed that people would be spending more on hotels in London. However, the data revealed that this was not the case. Based on these insights, Ampa increased the spending limits for hotels in London, giving employees more options and freedom in line with best practice recommendations.
- Insights into employee habits: The data offers insights into employee habits and preferences. For instance, if feedback indicates that a particular accommodation is unsuitable, it can easily be removed from future searches, improving travel comfort for staff.
- Efficiency: The system is so efficient that no approval processes are currently necessary. Employees use the platform as designed and stay within policy guidelines, safe in the knowledge that management have real time access to reporting and notifications. However, if there is a future need to implement an approval process, the platform can accommodate this with ease.
- Promoting greener travel choices: Currently, Ampa’s environment team is working on a sustainability campaign, which will include encouraging a shift away from domestic flights and driving, and instead advocating for train travel. The reporting features will play a crucial part in motivating employees by providing detailed data on how people travel and adding bespoke prompts during the booking path.
Duty of care
- live chat support that is responsive, quick, and helpful.
- 24/7 customer care to ensure that, if problems arise or travellers need assistance with a booking, support is always available, even late at night.
- the option to provide feedback through a dedicated support person to improve responses for employees.
What TravelPerk provided
- Intuitive and easy to use travel management platform
- Implementation and roll out of a successful self booking feature
- Customisable reporting
- 24/7 duty of care for employees
- Automated and robust travel policies