I doubt you know how alliance based corporate contracts work. At the company (a very large financial institution) I work for we have an alliance based contract. All employees must travel the alliance specified unless there is no nonstop option available from the alliance. Travelling outside the contract can result in not getting the cost reimbursed by the employer. The negative thing about corporate contracts is that the fares can be very low
Alliance-based contracts... interesting concept and not new at all.
Yet why would a large corporation tie its employees to a single exclusive supplier when a choice is almost always available and could generate generous savings when used appropriately?
A. Someone somewhere in the corporation receives an envelope at regular intervals
B. Corporation owns shares or interest in said supplier
C. Corporation receives money back through a back door
D. Family or political connections
If you work in sales, you know how it works.
At SN or any other airline, corporate contracts don't get that generous a discount. Yes, on paper it's double digit percentages, but that's on their crazy high fares.
What's 30% off a 700 return to LIN? Is it a good deal? Those who sign those contracts think so, because they don't care, the company is paying.
Teddy, the subsidies have been stopped indeed, but the Belgian post has been loss-making for most of the 20th century, so I don't believe in its continued success.
My company is a Bpost corporate customer, we always have issues with them. Parcels come back for no apparent reasons, second delivery attempt to my clients within 5 minutes from eachother, delays on every 3 deliveries, high charges for shipping to Europe. Whenever justified, we ship from Holland where we can get a lower rate as regular walk-in customer than when shipping through Bpost with corporate rates.
Their Shipping Manager is a useless sytem that tricks you into ordering Express if you're not careful and forces you to enter a house number following the street, while in some countries there are often no house numbers (UK), or they come before the street name (France, USA).
Whatever they charge us more for their horrendous service, we get it back through our weekly calls to the customer service, which is slow and inefficient. We call with Voip, costs us nothing, their staff however costs them 20 EUR / hour.
Also, I received a parcel from Asia, a half destroyed box. "If you want it, you take it, otherwise we send it back". As if I was going to pay another 150 euro's to have it shipped again, to get it again destroyed...
I still use them because there is no other viable choice, but if there is even a hint of a new provider, I won't hesitate to try them out. GLS is cheaper for some people, but they think that they're carrying waste.
If I had the volume, I would work with other corporations and set up a ccoperative parcel service that is cheaper, reliable, and would care. Somebody is bound to do that sooner or later.
Bpost's recent success is solely attributed to the closure of hundreds of post offices across the nation, replacing them by deposit boxes and "Postpunt", thus saving a lot of money on rent and staff.
I don't believe in either concept, the Postpunt where we drop off our parcels is fed up with us as they only earn a few cents on 5 to 10 minutes worth of scanning and printing a receipt.
So I think that Bpost's alleged success is only temporary and at the expense of angry customers.
In the last 2 weeks I carried 10 school groups 
