Went through the exact same thing at UC Berkeley back in late 2021. Went live on November 1, 2021 and within a few days people wanted to string me up alive. I had sold the whole thing on our Chancellor and her cabinet, but in the end, we were unable to push back on the head wind coming from our faculty. Our primary objective was to increase awareness about the program on campus and we definitely did this through our efforts, which has led to greater utilization. In the end, the program should be good enough that people want to use it and don't have to be forced to use it, but we all know that some people will never be convinced. Note our FAQs that we've published. https://travel.berkeley.edu/faq-page . In the end, this wasn't a hill I wanted to die on, which would have been the case had I continued to press the issue. But I am committed to continuing to try and increase awareness and publicize the benefits. The program isn't perfect by any stretch and by greater engagement, we can get feedback from campus on where the program falls short so that we can work with our partners to continue to improve those areas. I've been running a contest on campus for about a year now called "beat the expert". We invite anyone to join me for a 15 minute zoom call. I have a random generator for travel cities, and dates. So people can't plan in advance. We generate travel dates and the city they will travel to from the San Francisco area at the start of the 15 minutes. Then, they are given time to search for a round trip fare on any major airline or that airline's partners using any search engine that they prefer. We just always click through to make sure that fare is still available. We do not include any budget economy fares, as we don't offer those through our business travel program. After they pick one, then I go into Concur and look for the identical airline and route. Our guarantee is that it will be equal to or less than anything they find elsewhere. If not, they get a $20 gift card. So far nobody has won. Seemed like a great way to quiet those that stated that they could find cheaper tickets elsewhere and have a little fun. And also was a great way to educate business travelers on why they shouldn't select a budget economy fare. BTW, I think 76% compliance is quite good. I'd guess we're around 70% and will continue pushing.

Would love to see your communications.

We mandate at Tulane, from the start. However, there was no consequences and some figured that out quick. I used several tactics back then, some worked well. The Provost and the COO doubled down on the program after seeing the benefits of the hundreds of thousands of unused ticket credits we were able to recover from the pandemic, and use before expiring. The university lost several hundred thousand on the non-compliance. They were also impressed that we were able to bring back all of our travelers abroad when they couldn't get home, but not impressed with the additional cost of having to repurchase the tickets from our TMC because the students abroad were not part of the program and faculty were not in compliance. The provost and coo had us revise the policy in 2021, removing the soft voice (nicely), and add keep the four requirements for travel expense reimbursement page one, which included booking. We added the students and required that all Tulane "Related" travel must be booked through Tulane's Travel program (this helps include study abroad and travel we are not fully reimbursing). I'm happy to discuss the steps we took and how it's going, pretty well actually, we have surpassed our 2019 numbers by a landslide, some of these increases were in 2021. The key, having the senior administration send the policy/directive out, so you can use this for compliance issues. Buy-in from senior administration is key, it's not easy, but it's extremely important. happy to connect and discuss.

Congrats Laney, that's awesome. Much respect. We used the identical rationale, with respect to unused tickets, credits and lost funds as a result of non-compliance during the early days of Covid, but unfortunately, we were unable to overcome the backlash from faculty to keep the requirement in place. I may share your story with my leadership team, just so that they can see that it is possible and perhaps, at some point in the future, we'll revisit this. When we put a hold on the campus requirement, we didn't say that the requirement was cancelled, just that it was on hold pending further review. But it's been about a year now since then. The good news is that our program usage has increased anyway.

Like Tulane, we have a mandated program. It has worked well and we are so fortunate that we have support from leadership. During the onset of the pandemic, we were able to assist many of our travelers: faculty, students, staff return home safely and cost effectively.

Is it an ongoing marketing effort and upholding the policy? Yes!

I work closely with the expense and payment cards team and office of global safety and this helps to stay on message. Communication is key and happy to support in anyway I can.

At CU we do have a "loosened mandate" with a compliance of 94%. I will say that we do actively manage to meet this compliance percentage, including 100% audit of all out-of-policy purchases. The Travel Team is included in the Concur Expense workflow process for any airfare purchases using the "internet airfare" expense types. We have specific rules for granting an exception to policy that includes unavailability and cost https://www.cu.edu/psc/internet-airfare When an internet purchase does not meet the set exceptions to policy, we email the employee to communicate the policy to the employee.

I will say that we involved all our campus Controllers when we updated our policy in 2022 to include a dollar figure for cost avoidance. Additionally, Procurement Service Center/ Travel has control of travel policy with the support of the Controllers, which really is the key to a successful program.

I know this is late but I wanted to respond and let you know the VCU has a mandate to use the our Travel management company as well as the university card we have on file with them. It is a university policy. We also have it written in our expense workflow for review by my team when airfare is personally paid. There are few exceptions, especially on state funds. The Duty of Care was the big seller and when COVID hit it was an added benefit because we were able to locate and send communications to all of our travelers throughout the world. Another benefit to using our card on file (ATC - Airline Travel Card) and not allowing them to use their personal credit cards. We collect mileage from the various airlines and while we cannot use them as employees, we are able to give scholarships in the form of airline vouchers to students wanting to travel abroad and cannot afford the airline cost. The benefit to using a mandated travel agency far exceeds letting everyone just go online to pick a flight. No one wants another Southwest incident. We also do not allow the inexpensive or cheaper airlines, even though they do have direct flights and cheaper flights. They do not have the services that meet our Duty of Care.
Hope this helps

That's great. It is an ongoing battle, I save some of my best responses and send those when I get pushback. I'm happy to share some or meet about it if you want to reach out, larmstro@tulane.edu