Business travel is essential to professional growth and networking in today’s fast-paced corporate world. Whether you’re jetting off to meet clients, attend conferences, or oversee projects, having the right tools at your disposal can transform a grueling trip into a streamlined, efficient experience. According to the latest research, travel spending levels can witness a 23% surge this year. The modern business traveler faces unique challenges: tight schedules, constant connectivity, and the need to manage expenses seamlessly.
Equipping yourself with the best business travel tools is not just a matter of convenience; it’s a way to take control of these complexities. The right technology can make a significant difference, from apps that track your flights and accommodations to software that manages your travel expenses and keeps you organized. These tools empower you, saving time, reducing stress, enhancing productivity, and ensuring you get the most out of your business trips.
This blog will delve into the 8 must-have business travel tools that every professional should consider. Integrating these tools into your travel routine allows you to streamline your journey, maximize efficiency, and make your business travels as smooth and productive as possible.
8 Best Business Travel Tools for Employees
1. E-signature Tools
As a business traveler, carrying essential documents to sign contracts or agreements can be quite a hassle. Moreover, you also need to protect these documents from tearing or spillage of food or water as they contain critical information. Hence, storing them on the cloud and signing them using the e-signature tool on electronic devices is best.
An e-signature business travel tool like DocuSign, Adobe Acrobat Reader, etc., lets you sign and manage almost every contract. These tools can also fill all the fields in the document automatically, eliminating manual errors. Moreover, the documents remain safe through state-of-the-art encryption. Additionally, using e-signature business travel management apps minimizes environmental impact and saves time and money.
2. Video and Audio Conferencing Tools
Business travelers often travel across long distances to meet with clients, business partners, and stakeholders in person. However, this constant movement can make staying connected with their teams challenging, leaving little time to collaborate on daily tasks and maintain seamless communication.
Using tools for business travel, such as video and audio conferencing, provides businesses with various benefits. Whether communicating with your team on business trips or discussing tasks with your manager, these corporate travel tools are efficient, cost-effective, and scalable. Some helpful business traveler tools are Zoom, Google Meet, and Skype for video conferencing, messaging, and sharing images and videos.
3. Online and Offline Maps
As the go-to navigation tool, maps help business travelers easily get around a new destination. These business travel booking tools provide the fastest and easiest routes to commute. Moreover, you can also use maps to get recommendations about nearby places to visit, stay, eat, and things to do. Maps let you pin places in advance, add multiple stops, share locations, and choose the transportation mode.
Online maps such as Google Maps and MapQuest are excellent business travel tools. They detect your IP address and give directions from your current location. They also show precise travel time, traffic intensity, and distance required.
Moreover, you can download offline maps to explore the area in places without internet or weak Wi-Fi. On your business trip, simply download online and offline maps to make travel easy.
4. Travel Management Software
There are times when business travelers must hit the road on short notice, leading to the scramble to book flights and accommodations at the last minute. This can quickly become a time-consuming, costly, and stressful process.
With a good travel management software solution, you can get multiple personalized, policy-compliant flight and hotel options. This way, you can make faster bookings without scrolling through numerous websites.
Some business travel software solutions might also be available as business travel apps. With these business travel apps, you can get updates on flight cancellations, delays, hotels, car rentals, etc., on your mobile, helping you manage your trip seamlessly.Moreover, advanced travel management software like itilite offers 24/7 support via calls, chats, and emails in case of an emergency during the trip.
5. Flight Tracking Tools
What do you do when you have a flight re-routed, canceled, or landed in an unfamiliar airport? What if you have missed the flight and don’t know what to do next? This is something most business travelers don’t think about. They assume everything will go well.
However, you may need immediate help. So, keeping corporate travel tools such as a flight tracker handy is essential under such circumstances.
Flight tracking gives business travelers detailed flight information and helps them report on time. A business travel booking tool includes crucial information on thousands of airports, including maps, delays, flight cancellations, gate changes, boarding times, baggage claims, etc., with a real-time flight status system.
Moreover, business travelers can get instant updates from booking their flights until they reach their destination.
6. Expense Management Software
After a business trip, business travelers must manually submit bills for all expenses incurred. First, you must collect and save all the receipts from the trip and attach them to the monthly expense report. Second, you must compile them and submit them for approval.
Manual expense filing and reimbursement can lead to slow speed, data error, high cost, lost receipts, etc., as only physical copies are proofs of reimbursement. In such cases, business travel tools such as expense management software help accelerate the expense filing process. You can apply for reimbursements by scanning and uploading your receipts in real time. Moreover, the software automates expense processes such as approvals, payments, and reimbursements.
7. Task Management and Organizing
Managing and organizing tasks in the ‘new normal’ brings its own set of challenges. In other words, business travelers need to be flexible when managing tasks, attending meetings, communicating with their teammates, etc., while traveling.
Switching to a business travel tool such as a task management tool will help you organize, plan and prioritize your tasks and complete them more efficiently within the stipulated time. These corporate travel tools have unique features that will help you complete your work, let you collaborate with other team members, track time to meet deadlines, and many more.
Business travel tools such as Evernote are available on phones and the web and are easily accessible. You can also create and share agendas, memos, and reminders from your mobile phones anytime from any part of the world.
8. Business Card Scanner
Despite the growing age of social media and emails, business cards are still in the running. Address books have become digital as travelers don’t have enough time to save business card details on their phones manually. Hence, business travel tools such as business card scanners provide an excellent method of collecting and organizing contacts’ information during business travels.
By scanning your business card, you can automatically save the contact details on your phone. The information is saved using OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technology. This technology extracts and repurposes data from scanned images, pdfs, and documents, eliminating the need for manual entry and further simplifying the data entry process.
Why should you Opt for Corporate Travel Tools
Business trips can be pretty stressful and hectic if things aren’t organized. Using business travel tools like ITILITE will help streamline the process and keep you on a budget, saving a lot of time and money.
ITILITE gives you a seamless travel booking experience. The platform provides AI-based personalized and policy-compliant travel options at your fingertips, so you can finish booking the trip in 90 seconds.
We also help you with itinerary management, flight cancellation, and rescheduling. Moreover, with our impeccable 24/7 support, you can get a resolution for any emergencies during the trip via call, chat, and email
Get the FREE demo of ITILITE to try these features yourself.
