Successful Business Travel Management Best Practices

If you’re a travel manager, chances are you have some tricks up your sleeve. Depending on the objectives of your company, hopefully you’ve tailored a workflow to help you make the most of your travel budget without pulling your hair out. No matter how hard you try, corporate travel management can prove challenging. For many travel managers, the pandemic brought a sense of job insecurity as borders were closed and restrictions made even local meetings impossible. The rise of digital meeting spaces has mitigated the need for corporate travel and with the world “opening up” again, the needs of the business traveler have changed.

Business Travel Management

While volumes have decreased for many, the demands on Travel Managers have increased. It’s more important than ever to have good business travel management best practices in place to meet budgetary, efficiency, and sustainability requirements.

We don’t have to tell you that business travel management is more than simply booking a flight and sending an itinerary. You need to ensure you find the best value for your budget without sticking travelers on inconvenient routes. On top of the flights, you need to arrange accommodation with similar considerations. Then come all of the miscellaneous costs to keep track of. That’s not the least of the barriers to successful business travel management, however.

Challenges of Corporate Travel

Sure, you feel the challenges in your role day-to-day, but what’s the big picture for business travel management?

Managing Incoming Requests

If you’re the Travel Manager in your organization, it will come as no surprise that a primary challenge is managing incoming requests. For large organizations, the sheer volume of travel requests warrants a role dedicated to travel management. For small and mid-sized businesses, however, business travel management may land in the administration or finance departments and is only one of several responsibilities.

Whether you have procedures in place or not, travel requests or questions about travel likely arise from all directions. Email, Slack, the classic “hey, quick question…” of desk walk-ups. The inconsistency of these requests can be a huge distraction and can make it much more difficult to stay organized with priorities.

Approval Tracking

Receiving requests is only half the battle. Once requests come in, you also need to track the approvals flow to ensure authorizations have been granted at all the right stages, from all the right people. Depending on your company policies, this authorization may come from a single manager or may need to go to the VP or CEO level. Tracking approvals extend the business travel management process, and short of a full overhaul on companywide policies, there’s no way around it. If you’re tracking these approvals manually, here’s a hint on one of our top tips for business travel management: implement a travel management system.

Keeping Spending Within Budget

As we’ve learned during the pandemic, there is some great technology available to keep day-to-day business flowing, but there is no substitute for face-to-face communication. While business leaders often see travel as an essential part of operations and crucial to growth, finance leaders draw the lines to keep budgets under control.

Companies without a streamlined and strategic approach to searching and booking travel will find it extremely challenging to stay within budget while satisfying the travel needs of their organization.

Flexibility

Without a travel management system in place, travel managers are limited to where – and what – they’re able to book. When booking a vacation, it pays to do your due diligence and check every travel booking outlet you can for the best price and route. Business travel arrangements don’t have this luxury – you simply can’t spend your day hunting around on various sites and comparing the options.

You can’t please everyone all the time, that’s for sure. But having access to a broad travel inventory would help allow some flexibility in travel bookings and help to avoid the back-and-forth questions when confirming arrangements.

Reducing Errors

Making mistakes is part of being human and there’s no way around that. When it comes to booking travel, these errors can be costly. The mistakes may not be on your shoulders, even, and most can be reduced or avoided with proper systems in place. The time taken to find who approved a travel expense or to follow up details after changes are made can really add up.