20 August 2009

Barclaycard business travel survey

Nearly a third of SMEs do not follow a business travel policy, according to research released today from the annual Barclaycard Commercial Business Travel Survey.

According to the December 2008 poll of 2,202 UK respondents, 23% said their company does not have a policy, 4% admitted they ignore it, 4% said they don’t know if one exists, and 9% said they only follow it on an occasional basis.

Additional findings of the survey were:

Only 18% of all respondents knew that their company had an environmental policy in place, 69% said that their company did not have one and 10% did not know.

52% follow their company’s business travel policy, meaning that 48% of people either do not have business travel policies or ignore them.

The number of companies without a policy has fallen from 37% to 31% in the last year.

80% of respondents normally pay for their main business travel expenses using a company card. Only 3% use a personal credit card.

Barclaycard Commercial managing director Neil Radley said:
"The results from this survey show that businesses are not making use of travel policies that may already be in place or are very easy to set up which is resulting in a loss of money.

"By enforcing travel policies amongst employees and making sure that the procedures are correctly communicated this can lead to a SME business saving over £30,000 annually.

"In the current climate every part of a business should be working hard to ensure there are not unnecessary losses. Getting employees behind a policy and training them on its benefits is key."

In this survey, SME companies are defined as those with between 50-249 employees.

By Bev Fearis