Flights are a necessity for any business traveler and one of the biggest expenses. With airfares constantly fluctuating and fees piling up, costs can take a bite out of your travel budget. However, there are smart business travel flight deals strategies savvy road warriors use to keep their flight spending in check.
From scoring discounted corporate rates to leveraging airline tools, these insider tips can help you consistently find the lowest possible fares and the best business travel flight deals without sacrificing convenience or comfort. Follow these top-secret corporate travel flight discounts to optimize costs.Â
Strategies To Get Business Travel Flight Deals
1. Flexibility
Flights on peak business travel days (Mondays and Fridays) are always more expensive. Look for business travel flight deals by being flexible with your travel dates – even shifting by a day can mean substantial savings. Use tools like Google Flights’ calendar view to identify the cheapest dates for your route easily. This insider tactic can cut costs by 20% or more. You can often find significantly cheaper fares by adjusting your dates by just 1-2 days in either direction.
2. Use Tools
Don’t simply book as soon as you see a decent fare. Utilize free tools to analyze historic pricing data and get alerts on whether to buy now or wait. Their sophisticated algorithms and expert human analysts will advise the optimal booking window for your specific itinerary. These services consider seasonality, demand, and other factors to predict when fares will rise or fall precisely.
3. One-way Flights
Most travelers mistakenly search for return journeys together. But you can often find better business travel flight deals by searching one-way fares for each direction, even combining different airlines and routes. This counterintuitive method unlocks affordable options that may not surface in standard return searches. It requires a bit more effort to organize an itinerary, but the savings can be massive – up to 50% less sometimes.
4. Book Well in Advance
While conventional wisdom says booking too early means overpaying, the optimal time to get the lowest fares for business travel is 4-6 months before departure. Airlines purposely offer discounted pricing way in advance to fill flights and secure that corporate revenue. As you get closer to travel dates, airfares steadily increase as cheaper seats get snapped up.
5. Browsing Data
Clear Browser Data Booking sites have been known to mark up prices based on your browsing history and cookies. Clear your browser cache and history before starting a new flight search session.
Bonus Tips
1. Use Airfare Price
Tracking and Re-booking Tools Sometimes, the fare can drop even after booking a flight, leaving you stuck with a higher price. That’s where airfare price-tracking tools can save you money. Services like ITILITE monitor fluctuations. If your existing ticket goes down in price, you can cancel and re-book at the lower rate, as long as you catch the deal within 24 hours of booking. Just remember to deduct any cancellation fees from the re-booked savings first.
2. Understand Airline Pricing Patterns
Airlines constantly adjust pricing based on demand patterns and competition. Tuesday nights typically see a weekly fare sale as they aim to fill up unpopular flights. Similarly, flying on Thanksgiving or other holidays can be surprisingly cheap as leisure travelers avoid those dates. Meanwhile, Sundays are often the most expensive for domestic travel. Monitor airline emails or set fare alerts to pounce when they launch sales for business travel flight deals. With some smart pattern-tracking, you can save significantly.
3. Fly Connecting Flights
Don’t just settle for nonstop options from your home airport. Adding an extra “positioning” flight from a nearby city can sometimes unlock way lower fares. For example, a Boston to London flight maybe $1200, but flying first to New York and then connecting to the UK could total just $650.
How to Get Corporate Travel Flight Discounts
For business travelers, negotiating corporate travel flight discounts with airlines is a must to reduce spending. However, simply asking for better pricing won’t cut it – you need a structured, focused approach. Here are the steps:
1. Analyze Your Company’s Travel Patterns
Before approaching airlines, thoroughly analyze your company’s travel trends, routes, passenger volumes, and spending. This data on your travel patterns is crucial bargaining ammunition. Most airlines require meeting minimum revenue thresholds to consider offering corporate discounts.
2. Pinpoint Focus Airlines and Markets
From your analysis, identify which airlines your employees fly most. Also, look at your top domestic and international destination markets for business travel flight deals. These should form the concentration for your discount negotiations and vendor sourcing.
3. Explore Corporate Deal Options
Airlines offer corporate deal types like zone-based, systemwide, and city-pair pricing agreements. Zone-based offers flat travel discounts within geographic zones like the US Southwest or Asia Pacific. Systemwide extends discounts globally. City-pair pricing provides route-specific percentage corporate travel flight discounts for your top origin-destination markets.
4. Leverage Other Benefits
Beyond airfare discounts, airlines offer other benefits in corporate deals, such as priority services, lounges, waived fees, and more. Companies with higher volumes can push for perks like higher baggage allowances, fast-track security, bonus miles, and upgrades.
5. Negotiate and Review Contracts
Come armed with data to demonstrate your company’s revenue potential. Airlines will counter with projected discounts at various revenue tiers. Push for the lowest fare rules and limit restrictions. And don’t forget to benchmark competitors.
Get the Best Deals with ITILITE
With ITILITE as your corporate travel management platform, businesses can effortlessly access the most attractive business travel flight deals without tedious searches or complex negotiations. ITILITE does all the heavy lifting – leveraging AI and historical data to track fares across airlines continuously. It automatically surfaces the corporate travel flight discounts based on your company’s negotiated discounts and traveler preferences.Â
Employees simply select from optimized flight options, while managers gain complete spend visibility. From scoring discounted corporate rates to deciphering money-saving hacks, ITILITE is your secret weapon for affordable business travel flights. Book a demo.Â
