Basics of Corporate Travel Management
A lot of the time, companies don’t realise but they pay more than they receive in return for it. The goal of every good corporation is to get as much as they spend and in some case receive more than they spend. Corporate travel agencies are robbing big and even smaller companies in this regard.
In many companies corporate travels take up a major portion of their annual budget. Apart from the travels being expensive there are so many other things to take care of like booking flights, managing schedules, following guidelines of your company etc.
Thankfully, in these modern times corporate travel management solutions have evolved and has now become much more efficient than before, all the credits go to modern technologies many companies and agencies are using in this respect. Staying up to date with the technology makes a task easy and the overall budget is benefitted as well.
Let’s start with the really basic and then move on to the things that needs to be evaluated to benefit your corporate’s travel management.
What is corporate travel management?
To put it simply, corporate travel management takes care of all the business travels. Corporate travel management includes, planning and accommodating a business trip, executing corporate events and organizing anything that the corporate traveler needs to know. All these responsibilities should be done without disturbing the productivity of the company.
It is the responsibility of the travel management to look after the business travel and if it is executing as planned or not. One major thing to take care of is that all the company travel guidelines should be met.
Things to Evaluate:
Now that we know what corporate travel management is let’s evaluate a few things that every company should to make their corporate travelling efficient.
What Does your Company Needs?
First of all, you should know the needs of your company. When you are looking for corporate travel managements solutions you must know exactly the demands of your company. This way you would be able to get the appropriate management and services for your business travels.
Often times it is seen that a well-known corporate travel agency fails to accommodate some of its clients, this is not because their agency is incompetent but this could also be because they probably don’t have expertise in the services that you want from them.
So, to save the time of both parties you must always look out for the appropriate solution.
How Many Employees Travel and How Often?
This point relates to the point we made above. There should always be a precise data ready from your side. This includes, the number of employees that are travelling, frequency of their travels, is there a team that needs to travel often or is there one team that travels often but one that doesn’t travel often.
All this information is valuable when you are looking for corporate travel management solutions for your company. Having all this data, you can tell the management or agency accurately about the travel details of your company and they can help you much more efficiently.
What Kinds of Perks and Luxuries do you Offer?
Every corporate setup has different levels of perks and luxuries for different level of their employees. Your company might not give an entry level employee the same treatments as their top executives.
Before you go book or ask for corporate travel management solutions, you should know the number of employees that would be travelling economy class with different benefits and the number of employees that would be travelling business class with different kind of luxuries.
Evaluate your Current Travel management
This is a key step and it can give you so much insight as to what your company needs to improve, what are they lacking in and which parts of it are you satisfied with.
First of all, we want you to enlist everything good and bad. How do you manage your business travels, is there any team assigned for this task or if you let your employees book it for themselves?
After you are aware of the management, now, evaluate if you are happy with how things are going on or not. Just for an example, if you have an assigned team for it are you satisfied with their performance? If not then tell the corporate travel management solutions provider why not.
Agencies Should Conform to Your Company policies
This is another important task for the agency you are thinking of asking for travel management solutions. They should be aware of all your business travel policies and they must conform to it as well.
This way your employees can ask the agency directly and tell them about their travelling needs and details. The agency would then be able to give them the best services and manage the travel complying your company’s policies.
Expense Reports Must be Accurate
The agency should be able to provide your company with an accurate expense report. This is important because a company needs to know where their expenses are going.
A corporate wants to ensure that their employee is getting treated well, however, having an accurate expense report is just as important to make sure there is no misuse going on.
What an employee needs is to have a fair and easy solution of this. Your chosen corporate travel management solutions should be transparent and easy in transferring data and funds probably using an app.
Modern itineraries
When you are choosing a service provider for managing your business travels you should look if they are using modern technologies or not. Like we said above, modern technologies have aided corporate travels and have made corporate travel management solutions way more advanced and efficient.
Modern itineraries show live and real time data about any delays, cancellations or any other changes in the plan to the concerned parties automatically.
Customer Care
Lastly, you should also choose an agency or service provider that offers good customer care and support. Because problems and disturbances are inevitable but there is nothing better than having a good customer support.
In conclusion, once you have all this data collected you are now ready to compare your needs to the offers made by a corporate travel agency or service provider.
