Limousine Services Category Procurement Intelligence Report

Business practices within Limousine Services market are heavily influenced by changing trends across the category as well as within the broader Business Travel market. In recent years, the market has witnessed a significant number of strategic collaborations, mergers, and acquisitions. Such developments have enabled the suppliers to expand their portfolio of offerings, geographic presence, and value chain. Moreover, suppliers have also gained access to new technologies and resources.

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.

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.

As a result, category managers need to closely monitor the Limousine Services procurement trends and identify changes required in their procurement environment for the category.

Sometimes, procurement functions are unable to timely alter their practices while responding to market conditions. Industry experts acknowledge that periodically reviewing procurement best practices and adopting learnings from across procurement categories can help procurement teams respond to market needs in a more agile way. This report combines our experience of other categories with Limousine Services procurement insights and hand picks best practices that can work for category managers delving in this market.

For example, Large organizations seek engagement with global category suppliers. However, they must try to achieve the right blend of regional and global suppliers in order to ensure availability of management services at locations where global players do not have necessary capabilities.

Buyers should seek collaboration with suppliers to identify demand patterns within the organization. This includes data sets for the time of booking, duration, and preference for time and days. Using such analysis, buyers can build a comprehensive corporate guideline and ensure that a specific set of service providers are used for services. Moreover, these data sets can be used to identify cost-saving opportunities.

Category buyers should invite bids from all potential service providers that have the ability to meet the overall requirements. Bids must be evaluated based on pre-defined parameters such as financial strength, reputation, service offerings, geographical presence, and track record. Buyers can use standard scorecards to evaluate service providers and provide necessary feedback to rationalize the given scores. This helps in the effective documentation of decision-making processes.

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