Shawn Johnson, travel leader for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, has been recognized as a 2018 Best Practitioner by Business Travel News for coming up with a new way to measure air suppliers’ success.
Johnson has led the travel program for the church, a BCD Travel client, since 2013. One of the first things he noticed was that traditional key performance indicators for air travel didn’t reflect what mattered most to the church and its travelers.
So, he came up with a new metric: quality cost per mile. It combines traditional air travel data, such as on-time rankings, cancellation percentages and baggage-handling stats, with qualitative factors—like how well an airline manages emergency rebookings or responds to travelers’ requests. Cost matters, but quality matters more to the LDS church, which flies 65,000 missionaries to countries around the world. The church’s travel program ranked 47th on the 2017 BTN Corporate Travel 100, based on U.S.-booked airline volume.
The quality cost per mile approach “incentivizes or encourages our suppliers to continue to innovate and strive for optimal performance,” Johnson told Business Travel News. “It has made our dialogue with those suppliers more meaningful.”
Travelers are happier, too. “Internally, we’ve seen a significant shift over the last few years in traveler satisfaction scores,” he told BTN. “Even what you hear anecdotally—there’s been an increase in the level of satisfaction in what we are doing with suppliers.”
Looking for more ways to measure the success of your corporate travel program? Ask your BCD Travel account manager how DecisionSource® reports can help you dig deeper.
