What does Total Cost of Mobility mean for Business Travel?

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We already know that business mobility encompasses a huge range of transport providers, micro-journeys and planning, yet many businesses fail to identify and understand the true total cost of all this activity. The “Total Cost of Mobility” or TCM, refers to the combined cost of any activity in relation to business travel. That doesn’t just mean the cost of car hire or fleet vehicles, but all the other associated costs such as a vehicle repair, parking charges, and even the cost of someone picking up train tickets from a station.

Why is Total Cost of Mobility important?

Understanding the true cost of business mobility is crucial for ensuring that business decisions about corporate travel are based on accurate and robust data. For example,

You manage your businesses’ travel arrangements. An employee asks you to sort business travel for a client meeting. The cost of a train ticket vs. a flight is £60 less, so you book the train as it looks like the cheaper option.

In this example, the train may look a better option and as such, a business decision has been made around travel policy. However, this isn’t based on the total cost of mobility, merely just one aspect of it. Did the booker consider other costs such as;

• time to pick up the train tickets
• cost of a taxi journey to train station
• parking at the train station
• cost of expensed fuel travelling to the train station
• cost of food/drink at station/on-board train
• cost of WiFi on the train so staff can work on-board
• cost of taxi/bus/Tube from the train station to the destination
• time wasted by employee if they have to wait for off-peak time
• cost of additional food and drink (lunch/dinner) whilst they wait for train

There are many hidden business mobility costs that are perhaps never considered as part of the price. Of course, many of these also apply to taking a flight or hiring a car, but with a platform like Mobilleo you can finally compare all of these costs versus alternatives. In the end, the train journey could cost more than a flight.

How does Total Cost of Mobility apply to Fleet Managers?

TCM is equally as important to Fleet Managers as it is to Personal Assistants or Car Hire Bookers. Calculating all the additional costs of managing a fleet such as fuel, repairs, insurance and tax, gives them a true and total cost. Having an understanding of this data alone could be the difference between deciding to expand or reduce a fleet.

Analysing your business mobility data will also help Fleet Managers spot inefficiencies in their Fleet or travel policies. A simple insight that shows employees are wasting hundreds of thousands of pounds filling up at motorway petrol stations instead of cheaper supermarket petrol stations, could help craft a new fuel policy for a business. This alone could help the business reduce wastage and save thousands over the year.

Why doesn’t everyone know their Total Cost of Mobility then?

The benefits of TCM are obvious, but the work required to actually collect, collate and analyse the data can be incredibly laborious. If you’re an enterprise sized organisation with thousands of employees, trying to analyse all of that data on a daily basis is unfeasible. There is undoubtedly a mountain of expense claims, receipts and questions regarding business mobility. This is too much for a human to process.

Mobilleo directly answers this challenge with machine learning and our smart mobility engine. Every time a user find, books and pays through our app, their data is recorded, categorised and analysed instantly.

• Planning time is drastically reduced as we search thousands of suppliers in one click – you just tell us your start and destination
• Booking for the entire journey takes place in one single transaction thereby reducing time and effort
• Distribution of tickets and itinery is automatically done by the Mobilleo app into one simple storage solution
• Expenses can be claimed within the application allowing a better and more cost-efficient expense claim process
• Internal travel policies can be enforced within the app in order to help restrict breaches by your employees

Mobilleo is at the heart of managing all of these interactions so every bit of data is collected within the application. Therefore, all the hard work collating the information is instantly removed and allows us to spend more time analysing the raw data.

How does Mobilleo calculate the Total Cost of Mobility?

Using machine learning our application strives to look at every expense, preference and cost-efficiency of a single journey. It can collate all the associated costs into one value and then compare this figure versus alternate routes/methods of transport.

On a macro-level, Mobilleo can then categorise and provide analysis for all business travel across your business. Mobilleo is a Mobility as a Service platform that can provide you with a single cost of all business mobility for a given time frame. Mobilleo can break down every aspect of your business travel so you can understand the true cost and efficiency of fleet, car hire, train, plane, bus, taxi and more across your business.

With this data you can finally make better business decisions about investment, policy and planning for your business mobility strategy.