What Makes Managing Corporate Travel Difficult?

Travel managers are burdened with several responsibilities when it comes to administering corporate travel. Hence, it can often become challenging. Here are the primary roadblocks that every travel manager faces in their journey to achieve a seamless business travel experience for their employees:

 

 

Juggling between multiple responsibilities of corporate travel booking or planning can be difficult. These challenges can broadly take the form of:

 

• Modifying flight and hotel bookings to suit the needs of the employees.
• Revising corporate policies.

 

Keeping up with the changing trends in corporate travel management. Among other such time-consuming and demanding factors that can have a direct impact on the budget of the company, can be demanding. 

 

Let us understand the primary challenges that make managing business travel such a difficult task to accomplish and must be addressed at the earliest to optimize the company’s travel program-

 

The dedicated travel manager in a company or the finance/ administrative team is responsible for monitoring every aspect of booking corporate travel when several employees frequently travel to achieve different business objectives. This can often be burdensome when there are no defined procedures to handle a large number of requests for approvals or bookings. These disparate booking requirements can be problematic and hinder the responsible departments' productivity.

 

How to Resolve the Challenge?

 

This is where automation can be an easy answer to help easily manage multiple travel requests.

 

A comprehensive policy to book corporate travel can prove to be redundant if the employees do not adhere to it. This could be due to a lack of proper communication or because the policy is not practical enough to comply with.

A travel policy defines the following for regulating the employees’ travel:

• Procedures
• Protocols
• Approval flows
• Budget and limits
• Payments

..and more.

 

How to Resolve the Challenge?

 

Modifying the company’s policies to fit the travellers’ preferences can significantly contribute to higher compliance. Furthermore, good corporate travel solutions that provide complete visibility and control can play a pivotal role in avoiding out-of-policy bookings.

 

Travel managers have to do hours of research to find the most cost-effective corporate travel services alongside ensuring the highest quality of booking alternatives. There are several steps to this:

1. Researching
2. Comparing
3. Negotiating
4. Booking
5. Managing

 

Each of these steps of online corporate travel takes time and adds to the travel admin’s stress which can often lead to settling for an option that might not be ideal.

Additionally, not having enough options is another challenge that travel managers need to overcome as a limited inventory can leave you oblivious to the more lucrative options.

 

How to Resolve the Challenge?

 

Choosing a corporate travel management company with an extensive inventory is imperative to get access to a wide range of booking options to choose from, thus striking a balance between savings and convenience.

 

Businesses have shown a renewed focus on work-related travel that offers an opportunity for growth to the company and the employees. However, it can also weigh heavily on the company's financial budget. This can be a direct consequence of not finding the right low-cost inventory or high commissions charged by travel agents. Bookings and corporate travel expense management, therefore, need to be closely monitored.

 

How to Resolve the Challenge?

 

Partnering with the right travel management solution can unlock several corporate travel management benefits like exclusive corporate rates and offers, complete control and visibility over the travel expenditure, a large travel inventory, and more that can help increase savings on business trips.

 

With several employees simultaneously travelling across multiple geographical locations, tracking every booking and invoice in the corporate travel account can be cumbersome. This can further lead to missing invoices, finding errors, reimbursing unauthorized expenses, and other inefficiencies due to human limitations. Globally, a very small fraction of travel managers are able to efficiently audit in the absence of a corporate travel expense software or other internal resources. However, this inaccurate reporting can cost businesses a lot regardless of the reasons.

 

How to Resolve the Challenge?

 

The ideal corporate travel management companies automate every aspect of travel, including, approvals, payments, claims filing, and reimbursements, making the overall reporting and reconciliation more accurate and time-efficient.

 

Every travel manager must find ways to streamline corporate travel processes for their employees while ensuring higher savings by resolving the challenges above. The right corporate travel management company like myBiz can help resolve these with automated flows, guaranteed policy compliance, extensive inventory, advanced self-booking tool, total control and visibility, along with efficient expense management. All of these and extensively dedicated support 24/7 can simplify the travel management program for higher productivity of every business.

Also Read: An Ultimate Guide on Business Travel for Corporates

 

 

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) 

 

Q1. What is corporate travel management?

Ans. The overseeing of business travel planning, booking, approvals, and payments, for overall compliance is known as corporate travel management.

Q2. How to ensure travel policy compliance on bookings?

Ans. An ideal travel management solution can offer customised inventories, ensuring policy compliance by enabling travellers and admins to choose hotels within their budget and preference.

Q3. How to prevent inaccurate corporate travel expense filing?

Ans. A good travel management solution automates invoicing, making reconciliations more accurate and faster, thus preventing errors in expense filing. 

Q4. How to enable employees to make bookings as per their preference?

Ans. The best corporate travel agencies provide self-booking options to employees to book their business travel, thereby lightening the burden on the finance and admin teams.