In the corporate landscape, travel is often seen as a glamorous perk. The allure of jet-setting across continents, experiencing new cultures, and being part of high-profile meetings paints a rosy picture.
Beneath all this, however, lies a series of challenges that make business travel a demanding and often a gruelling experience.
Booking complexity
For companies relying on manual processes for travel arrangements, organizing and managing flights, hotels, ground transportation, and other accommodations can be overwhelming. This is particularly true for frequent travelers or large groups.
A corporate travel management tool can centralize these aspects, simplifying the process and providing a comprehensive view of travel expenses, which can be used to negotiate better corporate rates and discounts with vendors. The right tool can save time, money, and effort for organizations by streamlining business travel arrangements.
Compliance and policy adherence
Adhering to company travel policies and guidelines can be challenging without proper oversight. Corporate travel management platforms enforce travel policies by restricting booking options to approved vendors, notifying travellers of policy violations, and providing reporting and analytics to track compliance.
Communication and collaboration
Coordinating travel plans and itineraries among team members can be difficult, especially in large organisations with employees in different locations and time zones. Corporate travel management platforms facilitate communication and collaboration by allowing travellers to share itineraries, updates, and notes with colleagues and managers in real-time.
Data management and reporting
Accessing and analysing travel data is essential for identifying cost-saving opportunities, evaluating vendor performance, and making informed decisions about future travel investments.
Corporate travel management platforms provide robust reporting and analytics tools that offer insights into travel spending, patterns, and trends, enabling organisations to optimise their travel programs and achieve greater efficiency.
Expense management
Tracking expenses, receipts, and reimbursements can be tedious and error-prone. Finance departments often struggle with processing invoices, payments, and a multitude of other tasks.
By adding travel management to their responsibilities, corporations burden them with additional back-and-forth email chains, payment schedules, reimbursement claims, and policy checks. Corporate travel management platforms can streamline this process by allowing employees to upload receipts, categorize expenses, and submit expense reports directly. This simplifies expense management and ensures policy adherence.
Mobile accessibility
Employees in the digital age are definitely reliant on their mobile devices. This makes it a must really, for corporates to invest in a business travel platform that allows their staff to manage their travel plans on-the-go. This essentially means that travel coordinators or HR resources in charge of approving and raising requests for business travel need to access an integrated system or dashboard that can book, manage and track the trips of their employees without too many hassles.
This dashboard should also be customisable to include the existing travel policies of the organisation, to ensure a seamless booking/approval experience for the employee and the organisation.
The solutions are simple enough, really. For instance, a travel management platform tool should be able to negotiate corporate rates with airlines, hotels and other travel suppliers ensuring cost savings, finding flights and hotels that fit within the management’s budget.
Any corporate travel management tool worth its salt should be able to offer centralised booking across their travel arrangements. This streamlines the process and saves travellers valuable time. Additionally, they should be able to integrate expense management tools, allowing for easy tracking and reporting of travel costs.
All that a user-friendly travel management platform really needs to do is offer a centralised location for storing and accessing all trip information, including flights, hotels, car rentals, and even visas. This eliminates the need for travellers to manage paper documents or emails - making employees’ lives so much more simpler.
It’s important for companies to acknowledge these issues and invest in solutions that support their employees, from comprehensive travel management platforms to health and wellness programs - a thriving business travel strategy crafted for your employees needs is sometimes all it takes to make business travel a more enjoyable deal.
