Case Study: Savings achieved through travel program enhancements

Once the transition to Lightning was initiated, CTM uplifted Downer’s travel program, including policy updates, booker awareness training, and post-trip reporting and analysis. This activity underpinned Downer’s savings objectives and included the following account management activity:

• Maximizing Best Fare of the Day: across 15 months of focus, the average domestic segment fare fell by 13% ($254 to $220).
• Across the same period, the average price of restrictive fares booked fell by 14% ($227 to $194). Concurrently, the selection of restrictive (versus flexible) fares—a proven savings driver—increased to 79%, outperforming the established CTM benchmark. This was a 15% improvement on the prior year-over-year comparison.
• As a result of decentralization and re-engineering, the average travelers per Downer booker fell from 26.8 (2018) to 2.6 (2019). Similarly, the average bookings per booker fell from 48.9 per month to 4.7. This significantly freed up internal Downer resources, while online adoption saw only a 10% decrease (90%–80%) over the same period.
• Focusing on reducing segment fares on top four city pairs saw Downer achieve substantially reduced actual fares when benchmarked against CTM metrics (e.g., BNE–PER–BNE achieved $364.75 against a benchmark of $441).
• A focus on reducing the cost of ticket changes saw a decrease from $261K to $59K. This represented a reduction from 3% of bookings to just 0.8% of bookings, arguably the standout achievement in this specific area of activity across the entire CTM portfolio.
• Domestic hotel rates and—significantly—hotel attachment rates also improved dramatically over the reported period. Against a benchmark of $214 per night, Downer decreased from $183 to $172 in rates achieved, and against a benchmark of 32%, Downer increased from 46% to 55% in ensuring a booking across one or more nights was accompanied by an accommodation booking in a preferred Downer property (i.e., attachment rate).

Across our most recent contract period, a combination of account management analysis and recommendations, technology—specifically adoption of the Lightning OBT—and booking methodology generated savings of $3,248,210.

We also note that the strength and success of this partnership assisted CTM in securing Downer’s business in New Zealand.

Downer New Zealand joined CTM in August 2017, bringing two companies under one account—Hawkins Construction and Downer. CTM had previously been managing a third division, Spotless Group, since 2014.

In October 2017, all three divisions were consolidated under one agreement, improving policy compliance and providing clearer reporting visibility.