Traveling for Business or Pleasure? How About Both

HealthTrust’s travel management platform now features vacation planning options

You may have already discovered the value HealthTrust Travel can bring to your organization for business travel expenses. The latest feature, Vacations, opens up the world of leisure travel packages, allowing you and your employees to book everything from cruises to excursions and tours to hot air balloon rides and vacation rental properties all in one place.

“Within the HealthTrust Travel platform, booking personal travel has always been available for air, hotel and car reservation packages,” says Kim Allen, HealthTrust’s AVP, Indirect Strategic Sourcing. “Vacations is taking it to another level for our member organizations.”

Wide-sweeping travel savings

Available to members participating in HealthTrust Travel, Vacations offers more than 44 cruise lines; 20,000 curated resorts; 1 million hotels, resorts and rental homes; and 150,000 unique experiences worldwide—all at discounted prices. “On pricing and packaging, it’s second to none. It’ll blow your mind,” says Traci Head, HealthTrust’s Contract Director, Commercial Products.

While inflation is still putting pressure on personal budgets, research reveals the population’s desire to travel is high. With Vacations, employees can find meaningful value with up to 45% savings and no travel management fees. “I know our members are looking for any avenue they can use to capture savings for their employees as a way to retain talent during the current national labor shortage,” explains Head. “Vacations is an additional value-add that HealthTrust is putting in place to support our membership in their talent retention efforts.”

Following travel trends

“The Vacations option grew out of trends HealthTrust has been seeing in the travel marketplace, on the news and in what we’ve been hearing from members,” says Head.

More people are blending their business and personal travel, often adding leisure time before or after their business event, Head explains. “Let’s say they’re traveling to Nashville for business. Often they add on personal experiences in Nashville and maybe even a day or two in Memphis, where they might book a walking tour of historic Beale Street and visit musical landmarks such as Sun Studio and Graceland.”

But members do not have to travel for business to use Vacations. The Vacations option is for booking leisure experiences, such as weeklong family vacations or weekend get-togethers with old friends. Reservations made through Vacations are separate from and cannot be merged with HealthTrust business travel bookings. But if you want to add a family vacation on the end of business travel, HealthTrust’s Travel platform makes that seamless.

“The value we’re trying to bring to our members is making HealthTrust Travel a one-stop shop,” says Head.

Stay tuned

With an eye toward achieving a seamless experience and continuing to provide value to its members, HealthTrust has more travel-related features in the pipeline that will be rolled out to members in the coming months, shares Allen.

One that she’s particularly excited about is the Meetings and Events program. “It’s unique,” she says. “Nobody’s offering it right now as part of a TMC [travel management company] platform.”

As a sneak peek, the Meetings and Events program will help members capture and manage expenses around one-off offsite meetings and office space rentals. “Companies are trying to get their arms around this spend,” says Allen. “This tool will give visibility to the spend, helping members to effectively manage it.”

Get on board with Vacations through HealthTrust Travel. Contact your Account Director for more information or email commercial@healthtrustpg.com. And, watch THE RESPONSE newsletter for information about the new Meetings and Events feature in the coming months.