Tour and Travels · March 25, 2020

Take Help of an Expert for the Corporate or Business Travel

Modern travel management companies offer various tools and facilities that enable today’s corporate world to arrange business travels and travel management smooth sailing.

Business travel can be difficult to manage. As employees are traveling all over the globe, flights should be booked, accommodation should be arranged and endless lists of ancillary costs on its top. Work trips can be pleasurable and productive for employees. The trips should expand the network, create lasting experiences, and enhance your organization’s exposure. But managing corporate travelers management is a chore.

What is Travel Management?

Travel Management is a structure, which an organization has to facilitate and oversee business travel. It includes booking a trip, getting necessary documents and approvals to ensure compliance. Some organizations outsource it to specialized travel management companies while some have dedicated travel managers.

Business travel challenges

Business travel is an area wherein most companies struggle. If you think you have everything under your control, it shall cost you time and effort for handling the easy tasks. Some of the challenges are as follows:

  • Managing a huge number of requests

Many companies have people to monitor travel. The big companies have travel managers. However, in growing and small companies, this role is given to the administration teams. Company travel is common, but it becomes a real burden when there are requests from all across the business.

  • Tracking approvals

Just like admin people have to track requests, they should ensure that travel is authorized by the right employees. It means the manager or team leader should approve it and in some cases, the approval of the CEO is needed. There is where a travel management system is of help. Every manager shall be notified and they can give their consent without leaving their desk.

A travel management system

According to its name, a travel management system help companies manage travel. It can be a tool built from third parties and some large companies build their tools. In the SaaS days, a business travel booking tool is easily available at a low cost.

The job of this tool is regulating, overseeing, and coordinating the travel expenses and activities of the employees of a company.  Without the tool, they are basically huge manual tasks that are done mainly by office administrators or by a dedicated travel manager of a company.

With this system, you can streamline or automate the work. The objective is to make your staff free so that they can do a more valuable job other than monitoring the travel plan of others.

Automation is important

Most of the issues related to business travel are dependent on effort and time. All jobs that you ask the employees to do takes time. The greatest time killer is when the employees need to find out what is the travel policy of the company at the very first place. Every question takes time and every mistake can multiply it.

If the tasks are tedious and time-consuming then team members will not want them to do. They ignore rules and skip steps. However, when you automate it, you can build a travel policy in place. Nobody needs to remember anything or ask questions. They just have to follow the processes and do what is needed of them.

The outcome is travel booking along with fewer mistakes and additionally, the administrative team can do more important work. When employees book business trips themselves, they plan it as it will work best for them. You can restrict budgets and suppliers. The tools are user-friendly and flexible.

The emerging trends in business travel management

Involving technology has made business travel management is a rapidly changing industry. The latest trends are as follows:

  • Convenience against the cost

Many companies are selecting fates that offer flexibility and convenience over the basic economy rates.

  • Bleisure

Business travelers are extending business trips for leisure.

  • Lifting prebooking

Companies are removing pre-booking approval for reserving the best flight rates.

  • The increase in AI

Artificial intelligence is improving corporate travel management.

Innovation is changing the way companies manage the travel program. Travel-management software is making the lives of corporate travel managers much easier. With this tool, you can book airport transfer service, hotel locations, seats on flights, and others. As travel managers are spending less time on booking, they can dedicate a lot more time to business decisions, enforcing travel policies, and passenger care.