Business travel has been a crucial part of the corporate world for decades. As globalization multiplies, companies must send employees on business trips to conduct business activities and explore new business opportunities.
However, business travel comes with pain points that can hamper the employees’ business travel experience and impact your company’s bottom line. These pain points include providing travel support at odd hours, managing expenses, and changing the itinerary.
Fortunately, there are travel management companies (TMC) that solve these problems and ensure seamless business travel for your employees.
How a TMC can solve the major business travel pain points
1. Booking Complexities
One of the significant business travel pain points that companies face is the complexities in the booking process. It can be daunting for travel managers to book various flights, hotels, rental cabs, etc., especially with multiple destinations and itineraries.
Additionally, they must spend hours together browsing through various external websites, comparing prices, searching for the best deals, and making travel arrangements. Moreover, last-minute changes or cancellations can further complicate the booking process.
By investing in a TMC, travel managers don’t have to worry about travel bookings as they take care of everything. The TMCs book flights, hotels, rental cabs, or other travel services at the best prices. This is because TMCs have long-standing partnerships with the major flight and hotel vendors in the market.
Moreover, if your employees prefer a specific airline company or hotel chain, your TMC can negotiate for the best deals and discounts.
2. Travel Policy Compliance
Having employees comply with their company’s travel policy is a business travel pain point that most companies face. This mainly happens because the policy is not appropriately communicated to the employees, the guidelines are complicated to understand, or employees are simply unaware.Â
Another major reason is that employees are unable to view the policy in real-time while filing and submitting travel expenses.
By utilizing the assistance of a TMC, you can overcome this business travel pain point. The best TMCs use travel management software, which allows you to configure multi-level granular policies depending on the destination, employee level, and department, among other things. This reduces the ambiguity in travel bookings.Â
Moreover, this software helps employees get real-time visibility into the policy, which avoids any sort of policy violation. If any out-of-policy expenses are made, employees and the approver will be instantly notified.
3. Travel Itinerary Changes
Another significant business travel pain point is making changes to the itinerary. Sometimes, due to various situations, such as bad weather, client needs, event postponements, or employee reasons, travel managers must make changes to the travel itinerary.
This can be time-consuming, especially when dealing with multiple vendors and travel providers. Moreover, travel itinerary changes can disrupt the employee’s travel schedule.
With the help of a TMC, you can change or modify travel itineraries as and when required. This can include canceling or rescheduling flights, upgrading hotels, requesting special amenities, incorporating pick-up and drop-off services from hotels, and more.
As TMCs make all the changes in the itinerary, travel managers can save a lot of time. All you need to do is inform them about the change in the itinerary, and they will implement those changes. This way you can eliminate some of the corporate travel pain points.
4. Business Travel Support
As per a report, 63% of employees traveling for work changed their travel arrangements because of safety issues. Employees encounter various safety risks during business travel, such as natural disasters, political unrest, and pickpocketing. Female employees are at higher safety risk than their male counterparts.Â
Travel managers must provide travel support during such situations. However, sometimes, it becomes tough for them to do so because of the difference in time zones, outside work hours, or on weekends.
A TMC can help you overcome this pain point of business travel by providing round-the-clock travel assistance to business travelers. The new-age TMCs have a dedicated team of highly experienced professionals to assist your business travelers during any dangerous situations of their trip.Â
Alternatively, employees can also contact them via emails, chats, and even calls during emergencies.
5. Cost Optimization
Optimizing business travel costs is a critical challenge that many travel managers face. This is usually because employees make out-of-policy bookings because they don’t have access to enough travel options.
Cost leakage can also occur due to unused flight tickets and less visibility into employee and department-wise spending. With so much to do already, travel managers find it difficult to identify areas of cost leakage. Moreover, some of the best TMCs also use a virtual travel consultant. A virtual travel consultant, such as itilite Mastermind, compares your travel and expense data against industry standards and tells you where you could have saved more.
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6. Expense Management
Let’s face it; business travel is expensive! With so many business travelers going on business trips frequently, it becomes difficult for you or the finance department to manage expenses.
You need to keep track of all the expenses related to flights, accommodation, meals, ground transportation, etc. If you use the traditional method of managing these expenses, you must manually enter all the data into a spreadsheet to create expense reports. This is a very time-consuming and tedious process.Â
Another major drawback of this traditional method is that employees must collect physical receipts of all expenses and then submit them to the finance department. Such procedures are error-prone and can result in wrong calculations and results.
You can overcome these corporate travel pain points with the help of a TMC. Modern or tech-savvy TMCs leverage expense management software, which automates your expense management process. This makes it easier for travel managers and the finance department to track and manage your employees’ expenses.Â
The software uses OCR technology, where employees just need to click a picture of their receipt, and the details are automatically populated. Hence, there is no room for data entry errors.
7. Cost Reduction
With the increase in business travel nowadays, it becomes essential for companies to cut down on business travel costs. However, most of the time, travel managers do not necessarily have cost-efficient options when booking flights or hotels from traditional or online travel agencies. Travel managers also need help getting good deals and discounts, as they should browse various websites and compare prices.Â
Most TMCs assist you in reducing business travel costs, as they have tie-ups with various flight and hotel vendors. The TMC negotiates corporate hotel rates with them to get the best-discounted prices and better deals. They also reduce costs by incentivizing employees who choose the most cost-effective booking option.
8. Data Protection
Data is vital for an organization as it helps them with decision-making, problem-solving, or even improving the business travel management process. However, for many companies, protecting employee and company data remains one of the business travel pain points.Â
Travel managers must handle critical information from various employees daily. They must gather and save employees’ data, such as telephone numbers, credit card details, e-mail addresses, home and bank addresses, identity card details, etc. Such information must be handled carefully; if leaked, employees and the company’s security will be at risk.
By taking the help of a TMC, you do not have to worry about data security. This is because TMC uses travel and expense management software with state-of-the-art security features. The information stored in this software is highly encrypted. Hence, without permission, nobody can retrieve any information, thus reducing the chances of cyber-attacks.
Overcome Business Travel Pain Points with the Help of a TMC
Traveling for business is one of the essential aspects of the corporate world. However, it can be filled with various business travel pain points. A TMC such as itilite can help you overcome these challenges.
itilite is a travel management company that simplifies your travel management process. Our SaaS-based travel and expense management software helps you optimize your travel costs, provides 24/7/365 business travel support, configures granular policies, gives you access to our virtual travel consultant, and more. We also deploy a robust security infrastructure with Level 1 PCI DSS certifications, ISO 27001:2013, and more.Get a free demo of itilite to know more about our advanced features.
