Improvements will be made to the service offered by the university’s travel and accommodation booking provider, Key Travel.

Acting on staff feedback, the university’s finance teams have been holding regular review meetings with Key Travel to assess their performance against our service agreements, highlight examples of poor service and agree an improvement plan to bring the service up to the standard colleagues are entitled to expect.

Travel providers across the industry are currently experiencing sharp increases in consumer demand whilst also recovering their staffing and operations from two years of pandemic-related disruption. Like many organisations, including the university, Key Travel is experiencing challenges in recruiting and training staff. All of this adds up to reduced options for travel and accommodation, delays in answering queries and priority issues, coupled with poor communication.

As a consequence of the university’s intervention, Key Travel is making system changes to add further online booking features, including the ability to amend or change online bookings, for example to add baggage.

Further staff will be recruited, and a dedicated team put in place to manage enquiries by University of Nottingham staff. The aim is to reduce call wait times to less than a minute and to have all email responses prioritised by day of departure.

Chief Financial Officer Margaret Monckton said:

“I am very aware of, and apologise for, the challenges many colleagues have raised at our forums and the VC’s staff town hall events when trying to book, cancel or simply contact Key Travel. The issues being experienced are not what we expect to see from one of our main partners and we are working closely with them to monitor and improve their performance.

“I fully appreciate the frustrations expressed and trust that the improvements being made will result in a better booking experience for us all. We will keep the situation monitored closely and should the service not improve as promised, we will demand additional support or, ultimately, switch providers.

“Please continue to book your travel and accommodation requirements using Key Travel, it does offer the best solution at present to make sure you are protected whilst travelling. The travel sector is significantly disrupted, so should you book travel independently and your flight, hotel or train gets cancelled, or an unforeseen event occurs, particularly over a weekend, we would not be able to support you.”

A new Travel Sharepoint site has been published to provide all staff with the latest updates and travel advice, together with quick links to help you manage all aspects of travel.