Managing corporate travel is a tremendous task. There are so many things to consider, keep track of, and deal with. Every month, you need to consolidate travel expenses for the business, create itineraries for everyone, and try to resolve issues that occur along the way.
This is definitely not an easy thing to do. Employees these days travel more often than ever. Almost 20% of all trips are for business these days. Chances are, your company’s employees travel to get to meetings, work to build the company’s exposure, expand the network, and much more. Such frequent meetings make corporate travel management a very challenging chore.
Well, it doesn’t have to be that hard, not if you know what to use and how to make it all happen.
If your company is managing frequent corporate travels, below you will find 5 essential steps to facilitate this process and minimize issues.
Pick a tool for corporate travel management
Now that we have access to online booking sites and can scour the internet for just about anything related to travel, our options are limitless. We no longer have to rely on word of mouth to decide where to send the employees.
However, going through all of the options online is exhausting, not to mention very time-consuming. This is where tools like TravelPerk come into the picture. TravelPerk combines the convenience of booking everything online with a higher level of security. If you check out TravelPerk’s guide to corporate travel management, you can see how easy it can be compared to doing it all on your own.
With TravelPerk, your employees can create their preferred itinerary without straying from the budget or other restrictions set by the company. You needn’t manage budgets manually or try to keep up with the travel-related finances.
At any moment and at any time, your team has an overview of travel bookings and itineraries. Since this tool is filled with inexpensive, versatile options in a single dashboard, booking is made very simple. Starting from flights to hotels to meeting areas, you can book just about anything from a single tool.
Knowing all this, we can without any doubt, claim TravelPerk as one of the most useful online tools for businesses today.
Create travel policies for your employees
If you want your employees to stick to your travel budget and also enjoy the freedom of planning their own trips, you need travel policies in place. This is the best way to manage corporate travel. With the right policy plan and proper execution, you can increase compliance and minimize errors.
Of course, you might not be able to use the same policy for the entire company. Some of your employees will need a bigger budget and others will have different travel needs. Based on this, you should be open to creating different policies with different options.
Generally speaking, you should be considering the following things when creating your policies:
- Maximum cost of the trip (airfare or other transportation means cost, hotel cost, etc.)
- Minimum and maximum amount of days they can spend there
- Flight classes allowed by the company
- Hotel star rating
- Other expenses covered by the company (restaurants, leisure, shopping, events, etc.)
When you create your policies, you should also decide which of these points require approval and which ones don’t.
Provide support to your team
Many problems can occur when a person travels, and this can be disastrous if they need to get to a meeting or fulfill something with a tight deadline. Who do your employees call if they have trouble with their accommodation in the middle of the night? How do they deal with flight issues?
If you require that your team travels, you need to provide 24/7 travel support. Assuming that you don’t spend your nights waiting for people to call you, the logical solution here is to look for someone who can provide them with 24/7 support.
When you’re searching for tools and professionals who can handle queries related to corporate travel, there are a couple of things to be looking for:
- Non-stop availability and easy contact options
- Support in the language that your team speaks
- Experienced people who know how to deal with common travel issues
Plan for finance management
When you’re organizing corporate travels, you need to know how you’ll manage finances and keep track of them. This is not only good for your budget, but it is also required in your books.
Decide on what you’ll use to keep track of your team’s spending, how you’d like them tagged, and where you’ll keep this data. If possible, keep all travel financial data in one place that’s easily accessible.
Streamline the approval process
Those policies that we mentioned above need to be clearly shared with all involved parties. In other words, you need to implement the policies and make sure that the process is streamlined and flows without errors.
In this sense, here are some factors you should focus on:
- Share the travel insurance details and requirements
- Create pricing guidelines based on the travel policy in question
- Create location guides and tips for the locations that your team will visit
- Decide who will approve the team’s requests
- Decide on how you’ll notify employees if they booked out of policy
Corporate travel is on the rise with every passing year. Now that we are getting back on our feet after the pandemic, we can only expect business travel to grow around the world. That being said, the best time to focus on how to manage it properly is now. Hopefully, this guide will help you in organizing corporate travel easily and without much effort.
Authored by Monika Petrova, Skale
The views and opinions expressed in this post are entirely independent of The HR Gazette (Iceni Media Inc.)