Booking business travel can be a time-consuming process that requires a lot of attention to detail. It involves surfing through many websites to find flights and hotels that meet the traveler’s preferences and still meet the company’s travel guidelines. The task becomes more onerous with last-minute changes, unexpected flight cancellations, and other emergencies.

Hence, many companies assign a single person to handle all of their business travel booking arrangements. While this looks like a convenient solution, there are several reasons why this approach may not be the best: 

1. Increased Risk of Errors

A single travel booker is often rushed and overworked since this isn’t the only task they are responsible for.

As a result, the travel booker is likely to make mistakes that significantly inconvenience employees. For instance, travelers may miss flights due to a scheduling error or find the hotel reservations inadequate versus quality or safety expectations. 

Alternatively, if you onboard corporate travel management software like ITILITE, it can empower employees to self-book travel while avoiding errors and staying within the travel guidelines.   

2. Inadequate Support 

Business travel can be volatile and travelers might require assistance at any time with any aspect. For instance, more than 15% of travelers require last-minute changes. Often this is because a customer postponed the meeting or the employee extended their stay to attend to an unexpected problem. 

Making such changes can be difficult when a single person books business travel. If that person is unavailable or out of the office, they cannot respond quickly to such unexpected events. And upon returning, they may get stuck for hours on end trying to contact airlines or hotels for support – which traditionally takes hours, if not days.  This can make your employees feel abandoned and cause unnecessary panic.

Moreover, if employees face any other emergency injury or natural disaster, a single travel booker might not be able to provide adequate support. 

3. Impossible to Optimize Travel Spends 

Under the pressures of a slowing economy, every company is looking at ways to optimize processes and costs. Having clean data is crucial for all optimization efforts. Moreover, it can help improve travelers’ experience, incorporate sustainability into the travel process, and more. 

However, if you have a single person booking flights and hotels through consumer travel apps, getting insights from travel data becomes nearly impossible. 

This is because consumer travel apps don’t offer any reports or dashboards containing travel-spend data. Moreover, the travel booker is forced to collect data manually. This reduces the time available to them for analytics, and the quality of insights will solely be dependent on their analytics expertise. 

However, if you manage bookings with a state-of-the-art software solution like ITILITE, you can get the entire travel data on a single platform. Moreover, you can also leverage our AI Analytics Bot- Mastermind. The bot conducts historical travel data analysis and industry benchmarking to identify cost leakages and saving avenues. After that, it gives you actionable steps to help you save big bucks on business travel.  

If you want to see how Mastermind works, get a free demo now. 

4. Increased Burnout

Booking business travel can be a stressful and time-consuming task. A single travel booker is much more likely to be overwhelmed with the workload, leading to decreased productivity, burnout, and them leaving the workplace. This can put the company in the unenviable position of hiring a replacement, taking vital time away from revenue and growth. 

Onboard Travel Management Software to Optimize Bookings 

The above-mentioned points give you a comprehensive idea of why assigning a single person to book travel is a bad idea. A more efficient alternative is to onboard an automated travel management software like ITILITE. 

With ITILITE, your employees get an easy-to-use self-booking tool that can help them save 1 hour of booking time per trip. Moreover, they get 24/7 free-of-cost travel support to help them make cancellations or handle emergencies with ease. 

Our platform is not just a delight for employees but for companies as well. With the world’s first AI Travel Bot-Mastermind, your company can get detailed travel data insights for cost-saving and process optimization. 

To get a first-hand experience of all these advanced features and more, talk to our solutions experts now.