How Smarter Travel Management Strengthens Business Operations

Business travel is often essential for networking, expanding your business, and client engagement, but it can also be motivating for employees. However, it can also be a draining and costly process if not executed properly.

Smarter travel management is transforming how organizations approach business trips and provides a business travel experience without the downsides. It’s a more strategic and cost-effective way of handling business trips.

Travel management uses technology, centralized platforms, and modern policies to help businesses organize exceptional business trips. In this article, we’ll explore what smart travel management is and its key benefits. 

Smarter travel management explained

Smarter travel management is a modern approach to organizing and overseeing business travel. Traditional business trips required manually purchasing tickets, tracking receipts, and following policies that are usually archaic.

On the other hand, smart travel management uses digital, modern tools along with centralized platforms and data-driven decision-making. The centralized booking system allows employees to plan and reserve anything from flights to rental cars without switching dozens of platforms.

Platforms like TravelPerk also offer several other features. For example, it allows real-time expense tracking and invoicing, which makes it a lot easier for the accounting department to handle business trips.

This can also include travel policies that ensure employees stay within budget and follow company guidelines. In the worst-case scenario, these platforms help travelers with their safety and compliance. 

Features like live alerts and built-in duty-of-care tools help travelers to recognize dangers beforehand, preventing bad outcomes. Some platforms also include sustainability features that help businesses track and offset their carbon footprint.

This is especially important for companies looking to stay green, directly impacting their reputation. To conclude, these tools take the stressful aspects of the business trip lifecycle and enhance the positive ones. 

Key benefits of smarter travel management for business operations

Once you grasp what travel management is, let’s move on to its benefits. There are a lot of different benefits that you’ll get. However, some of these are more convincing than the others. 

Travel management platforms can be costly, so you should explore your budget and understand whether the pros outweigh the price. 

Cost efficiency

One of the primary drivers for adopting smarter travel management is the potential for significant cost savings. Traditional travel processes often involve decentralized bookings, inconsistent vendor use, and poor visibility into spending, which we’ve all mentioned before.

All of these inefficiencies lead to budget overruns and administrative inefficiencies. One way in which this is solved is through automatically enforced travel policies. Employees are guided to book within pre-set budgets and preferred vendors.

This can help set boundaries for employees. You can either allow them to make a choice between preferred and other vendors, but they’ll have to use their own funds, or they should cut back on other costs of the trip.

Consolidating the travel data can make future experiences much better. Data like expenses, arrival times, and the experience of the employee can all be tracked, allowing decision-makers to organize trips better based on feedback and data. 

Many travel management platforms also offer negotiated rates and discounts. They might offer corporate-level deals on flights, Airbnb, hotels, and transportation. Of course, not all platforms offer the same discounts.

One of the greatest benefits of modern platforms is automation. With automated workflows, companies can reduce booking errors and ensure that the flights and hotels are booked at their lowest price. 

Better productivity 

Time spent on planning, booking, managing approvals, and filing expenses is time taken away from core responsibilities. Smarter travel management can significantly help companies save time, manpower, and resources. 

Employees can book travel quickly using pre-approved tools that eliminate the need for back-and-forth emails or phone calls. If the trip is organized for them by someone else, it saves the other person’s time.

If the platform allows integrations with other software, trips can be approved by higher-ups with a click of the button. It can also be synced with calendars and project management tools, preventing employees from missing important meetings, flights, or check-outs. 

Of course, the fact that employees won’t have to organize logistically complex trips themselves helps with productivity, as it saves their time. However, they’ll also be more productive during the trip, since they’ll have a streamlined experience.

With centralized communication and real-time updates, employees won’t have many interruptions. 

Less stress

If employees don’t have to worry about the usual problems with travel, it will certainly lead to less stress. I mean, I get stressed when I go on a trip as a tourist and have some ambiguities, the problem is even greater with business trips. 

It will help them focus on their tasks and the reason why they’re on the trip. 

Opportunities for sustainable practices

As mentioned earlier, travel management platforms can have sustainability features, which can positively impact a company’s reputation. Some options have detailed dashboards on sustainability that are as detailed as tracking the CO2 released from the trip.

Platforms may also suggest trains over short-haul flights or eco-certified hotels. This helps companies align with their environmental, social, and governance targets. 

Travel experience personalization

Employees who are frequent travelers can receive special offers from the target management platforms. Furthermore, they can have greater freedoms in personalizing their trip, making it a much more enjoyable experience.

Allowing employees who are known to operate within the budget to pick their hotel and activities is a great way of boosting their morale. 

Implementing travel management for businesses

Implementing travel management is more than picking a software. The process starts with assessing the current state of your travel processes. Maybe they’re too simple, or maybe your company has business trips so rarely that there’s no need for it.

However, if you’re reading this article, then you likely require it. You should evaluate how many employees currently go on trips, what travel policies you have implemented, who oversees the trips, and what the expenses are. 

This basic audit helps identify which parts of the process can be improved, where the inefficiencies lie, and if there are some costs that should be noted. Once that part is finished, it’s important to create a draft version of the travel policies.

It can start with booking classes, e.g., economy vs. business, and cover costs like lodging and meal limits. Then, you can move on to creating policies associated with more complex aspects, like preferred vendors, approval hierarchies, daily timelines, and rules around changes, cancellations, and reimbursements.

Once you know what you want and what the policies are, choosing the right travel management platform is the next step. Features to consider include:

• Centralized booking for flights, hotels, trains, and rental cars
• Expense tracking (preferably in real-time)
• Policy enforcement and approval
• Integration with existing accounting, communication, calendar, and HR systems
• 24/7 traveler support
• Carbon tracking and sustainability tools

If the platform is picked, you need to onboard your employees. Not only the ones that often travel, but also other departments like accounting, compliance, and management. They should be introduced to the new travel policies. Eventually, you only have to designate travel approvers and train them on workflows.

The last step is to constantly monitor and evaluate your travel management processes. Analyzing travel spend, employee productivity while on trips, and their satisfaction can help improve the process over longer periods. It can also identify bottlenecks and reduce unnecessary spending. 

In some cases, travel policies won’t work, or employees will be unsatisfied with them. This should be addressed properly and adjusted. 

Smart travel management is crucial for businesses

Not all companies need business trips. However, many find it crucial for various processes, like finding new clients or working on their brand image. Business trips can be costly, especially for startups and SMBs. 

Leveraging smart travel management can help them cut the costs that might be a significant portion of their budget. When employees don’t have to worry about booking flights, hotels, and renting cars, they can focus on the aspects of the business trip that matter.

Imagine if an employee travels to another country for the first time, and they have to do everything themselves. Whether they’re there for a presentation, business conference, or meeting a new client, the stress from the trip itself might worsen their performance.