Chartered Bus Services Category Procurement Intelligence Report

A changing ecosystem within the Business Travel market also affects the procurement process, cost dynamics and supplier attractiveness for the buyers of Chartered Bus Services. Travel managers have begun to understand the implications of their colleagues' personal data being handled by a third-party provider, more so after several high-level data breaches. While it is still not possible to completely avoid the data sharing, buyers are more diligent in inserting elaborate data security and confidentiality clauses in their contracts. These developments increase the risks and compliance requirements, which in turn adds to the cost of services.

To simplify the corporate travel and events process and enhance the end-to-end experience of users, suppliers are innovating with tools that aggregate the multiple fragments of this process such as booking, management of disruptions, customer service and spend within a single interface.

Consumer markets are underpinned with apps and websites that offer a very friendly experience for bookings and cancellations - an experience that has not yet crossed over to the corporate segments. As executives grow more accustomed to self-planning and self-booking in their personal lives, they expect similar convenience in their business lives as well. In the absence of right tools and technologies, a lot of friction can be generated between employees looking for convenience and travel departments looking to enforce rules and policies.

Chartered Bus Services procurement best practices are moving towards a level of sophistication which is typically seen in traditional procurement categories. Category managers now have an attractive opportunity to adapt the best practices seen within this category as well as those being leveraged in other non-related categories. This report summarizes the best practices picked from across multiple categories that could work well for category managers involved with Chartered Bus Services procurement strategy.

For example, Suppliers often charge substantial fees for cancelation and rebooking. Buyers should negotiate for low prices on these aspects to realize direct cost-savings.

Engage with suppliers that use technologies, such as SMMPs and holograms, to enable buyers to track expenditure and save on travel costs. This will significantly reduce overheads for buyers.

Investing in benchmarking studies help category managers enhance their knowledge about market pricing or billing rates based on job roles and functions. This allows them to not only save costs but also negotiate with suppliers. For example, while negotiating on rates of bundled services, buyers can save significantly on a single service by cross verifying the rates quoted by suppliers against industry benchmarks.

Chartered Bus Services procurement managers also need to proactively identify and mitigate potential risks that can arise in the supply chain or contracts for Chartered Bus Services procurement. Some examples include: