Meet Catherine Barby, Systra Travel Manager

In your export-oriented business, business travel is essential...
Catherine Barby - Systra is involved in urban and rail transport engineering: tramways, tram-train systems, automatic metros, high-speed buses, high-speed trains, etc. Depending on our projects and our order book, we can send staff to Panama, Tbilisi (Georgia), Mecca or Tunis, but most often to far-flung destinations in Asia and Latin America. Not forgetting trips to the wider European continent, including Russia. We currently employ over 800 people in France. Of this total, nearly 600 employees, some of whom are intermittent employees of the SNCF or RATP, travel on business all over the world.

What payment solutions have you adopted for your travel expenses?
C. B. - First of all, our annual business travel budget is around 3.5 million euros. This breaks down into €1.5 million for air tickets, €530,000 for train tickets, €1.1 million for hotel expenses and around €40,000 for miscellaneous expenses, including car hire. Catering is not included in this budget. We use a dual system to pay for travel expenses: business cards and a card held by our Egencia agency.

What expenses are charged to the card?
C. B. - All ticketing expenses, equivalent to a budget of €2 million, are channelled through our AirPlus card. With this supplier, we particularly appreciate its acceptance by some twenty low-cost airlines and the quality of its reporting. This valuable document saves us a lot of time. Especially as we use Notilus from Dimo Gestion to process invoices automatically. What's more, we use the data in the report to conduct firm negotiations with our suppliers. The only downside is the small number of hotels listed by Egencia that accept the hotel card. As a result, only 10 % of our hotel expenditure passes through this channel.

What methods of payment do you use to pay for these hotels?
C. B. - Our 400 or so employees with a business card use this method of payment to pay at the hotel. Expenses are debited from their cards every sixty days. And they can be reimbursed three times a month. As the business cards are issued by BNP Paribas, we can obtain joint BNP Paribas-Air Plus reporting.