Adient saves 16% on flights since onboarding with Navan

Since onboarding with Navan, Adient has enjoyed a seamless and intuitive travel experience that allows its European employees to travel with ease — a world away from its previous solutions. Working for a multinational company, Adient’s European employees travel frequently across the region, including to the UK, Germany, Serbia, and Romania. Adient has two main categories of traveller: administrative workers, who tend to travel to its office locations, and production workers, who travel to its factories in more remote locations. It therefore requires a travel provider with an extensive inventory selection and excellent customer support for when things don’t go as planned.

Before Navan—the problem

Prior to Navan, Adient combined a legacy travel management company (TMC) and an online booking tool (OBT) for its global travel needs. Neither of these disparate solutions served its purpose in Europe, creating significant inefficiencies for Adient employees. In particular, it suffered from:

Travel booking issues

• Insufficient accommodation inventory, particularly for its production workers who required cheaper options in more remote locations, close to Adient factories.
• Travellers couldn’t book with low-cost airlines through the OBT, forcing them to book off platform directly with the airline.
• With off-platform bookings a necessity, Adient's travel team lacked comprehensive spend data, hindering planning and budgeting.
• All off-platform bookings required admin approval, so the travel team's workload grew as it manually reviewed employee travel plans. The team also had to book travel on behalf of less tech-savvy employees.

Support shortcomings

• Travellers were frustrated by their TMC’s customer support at a time when there were ongoing flight delays and cancellations globally. Wait times were extensive and travellers were sometimes left stranded on trips, unable to get through to support agents to reschedule their travel plans.

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“Before Navan, gathering travel spend data was cumbersome and time consuming.”

Juraj Krajcik

Manager Credit Cards Global & Travel EMEA

Why Adient chose Navan

Realising that having two disjointed solutions wasn’t working for its regional travel programme, Adient’s European team set out to find a single travel provider to meet its specific needs.

It wanted a platform where travellers could easily self-book without support, a broad hotel selection, and an intuitive user experience.

Although Adient didn’t consider Navan a frontrunner before the RFP process, it soon became clear that Navan was the ideal partner due to its superior booking platform, extensive travel inventory, and excellent customer support.

The Navan effect

Swift results

Onboarding was “very straightforward and well prepared,” Juraj says. “The contract, data privacy integrations, and implementation were perfect.”

Adient travellers immediately felt the benefits of Navan and began self-booking trips with ease on the intuitive Navan platform, choosing from an extensive inventory that includes low-cost airlines.

Juraj's team, meanwhile, can now focus on “strategic tasks that provide business value rather than dealing with daily traveller issues.”

Although there were initially teething problems with hotel inventory in some remote locations, these were soon rectified after collaboration between Navan and Adient. Juraj recognises that “as with all partnerships, issues arise. The difference is that with Navan I have full confidence they’ll be solved.”

Enhanced reporting capabilities

Before Navan, Adient struggled to optimise its travel programme due to insufficient data.

Juraj’s team didn’t have full visibility of traveller whereabouts, overall trip costs, or areas of overspend.

Whenever the team required this information, it had to send an email request to the TMC’s customer support team and wait for an answer.

With Navan, it now has instant access to the data it needs and can build reports in minutes.

Support for meetings and events

Adient also uses Navan’s meetings and events services to organise large company events.

The team at Adient briefs specialists from Navan company Reed & Mackay on its event requirements and Reed & Mackay takes control of the entire process, organising events for thousands of employees around Europe.

The feedback from the Adient team about Navan’s meetings and events support has been excellent. For the first event Adient organised using Navan in Prague, Adient had a great experience and “there were literally no complaints”, says Juraj.

The benefits Adient is seeing

With Navan as its European travel partner, Adient travellers are now travelling with ease and benefitting from an extensive inventory selection and first-class customer support. 

Teams across the company are reaping the rewards of Navan’s travel solution:

Travellers:

• Self-book travel quickly and easily on the user-friendly platform
• Choose from an extensive travel inventory, even in remote locations
• Get support immediately through the app

Travel managers:

• Access all platform data in real time 
• Create detailed reports in a few clicks
• Use accurate platform data to negotiate beneficial rates with suppliers

Finance team:

• Sees travel spend in real time
• Gets in-depth programme data insights

Sustainability team:

• Uses real-time data to track carbon emissions against sustainability targets
• Promotes environmentally friendly choices with travel policy changes