Effective corporate travel management is crucial when it comes to monitoring and controlling business travel expenses. In fact, good corporate travel management can even lead to both time and cost savings that could contribute to your overall business success.
If you are interested in learning how corporate travel management can help save you time and money, you have come to the right place. In this article, we will explore the various factors of corporate travel management that are cost effective and time efficient.
Let’s dive right in!
Relationships
Partnering with a corporate travel agency offers numerous benefits. These include the opportunity to take advantage of exclusive discounts that such travel agencies have access to because of their relationships with hotel, airline, and car rental companies.
This means that you can significantly cut down on your travel expenses, especially when booking through your travel management agency. Although the discount amount might seem small at first, the savings will accumulate over time, and you can expect to see year-on-year savings.
Efficiency
Corporate travel management in the UK needs to be efficient and intuitive – just think about the large numbers of business travellers who gather at prime corporate hotspots like London for meetings and conferences. Plus, you have to take into account last-minute changes, unforeseen circumstances, and other situations that could affect your travel.
This is where a streamlined and/or automated corporate travel management solution comes in. Corporate travel management companies offer the latest technology and software, providing you with tools to efficiently and effectively manage all aspects of your business travel, from expenses to travel data.
Manually planning and organising a business trip is time consuming, but having your own personal travel manager do this for you allows you to focus on other tasks that require your attention.
Human Touch
Speaking of focusing on other tasks, having a third-party corporate travel management agency handle your business travel needs, also enables your employees to invest their time and effort into other aspects of their work. In turn, this can boost productivity within the workplace.
Having to manually manage travel expenses and travel planning can be challenging, especially when your employees have other matters to attend to. With a corporate travel agency, employee stress can be significantly reduced. This is also because they now have access to a travel consultant who they can turn to for support and business travel enquiries.
This is even possible while they are already “en route” – a travel consultant can help them set realistic travel goals, especially in terms of cutting down costs for their travel.
Reporting
Reporting is made easier and simpler with corporate travel management solutions. The ability to generate and analyse reports is essential for gaining insights into overall business travel, helping you to identify potential areas for improvement and address concerns.
When you partner with a corporate travel management company, you will likely be given access to tools to assist with monitoring travel expenses, allowing you to view and evaluate expenditures. This saves you time from having to manually go through travel receipts and more.
Through the travel-related insights gained, you can make better decisions about your organisation’s travel expenses and create/amend policies regarding employee business travel. As a result, you can quickly save money more efficiently with initiatives that are data-led.
Flexibility
Travel plans can change at an instant, which is why it is important to have a corporate travel management platform that offers flexibility, regardless of the change of circumstance. When you, or your employee, are solely responsible for the travel arrangements, it can be time consuming and frustrating to deal with changing travel plans by yourself.
This can even incur additional fees or expenses that could be avoided – in fact, a corporate travel management solution can solve these problems for you and your employees at a moment’s notice. A corporate travel manager or consultant can help find the ideal solutions to any change of plans, saving you the time from having to do it yourself.
This can also lead to potential cost savings as a travel consultant will be knowledgeable and experienced in dealing with matters like these, meaning they can find affordable alternatives whenever necessary.
Investing in Corporate Travel Management for Business Success
The corporate travel services market has grown at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 8.5% in the past five years, and is expected to grow even more in the next five. This shows that companies are increasingly finding value in corporate travel management companies.
Being able to cut down on travel costs, while having more time to deal with other pressing matters, are key benefits that you can reap by investing in a corporate travel management solution.
