Corporate travel management is a critical aspect of many businesses, particularly those with employees who frequently travel for work. Travel management can involve multiple tasks, such as booking flights and hotels, managing expenses and receipts, ensuring compliance with company policies, and tracking travel budgets.
With the growing use of technology in business, many corporate travel booking companies are now leveraging travel management software to streamline their travel processes, enhance their overall travel management experience, and provide higher accuracy and efficiency.
How Best Corporate Travel Management Software Improves Travel Process?
1. Enhances Efficiency
One of the main benefits of corporate travel management software is that it automates many tasks in managing corporate travel. The traditional method of managing these tasks includes browsing multiple websites for the best deals and travel discounts on hotels and flights and manually entering the expenses in a spreadsheet. These methods are time-consuming and inefficient and often result in errors.
The best corporate travel management software automates these tasks, saves time, and reduces the risk of errors, resulting in increased efficiency. For example, the corporate travel management software automates booking flights and hotels, which can be time-consuming when done manually.
With the help of business travel management software, employees can make their own travel arrangements and receive real-time notifications about their itinerary, flight changes, and travel alerts. This reduces the time and effort required to make travel arrangements and provides a more streamlined experience for travelers.
Travel management tool also automates the process of managing expenses. Employees can submit their expenses while on the go and see the real-time status of their claims.
2. Ensures Cost Reductions
Another major benefit of corporate travel management software is its ability to help corporate travel booking companies save money on their travel expenses. However, occasionally business travelers have a tendency to exceed the required budget.
For example, there are instances where employees submit travel requests shortly before the start of their business trip. This may coincide with a period of high flight prices, resulting in increased costs. Additionally, expenses incurred during the trip, such as meals and miscellaneous costs, which may not have been monitored, can also contribute to an escalation in expenses.
State-of-the-art software such as ITILITE aids in reducing business travel costs with the help of a virtual travel consultant. A virtual travel consultant like ITILITE Mastermind gives practical data-driven insights and suggests where you can cut down on travel costs.
The AI analyzes employees’ travel history and recommends where you can save more by comparing it with industry standards.
3. Improves Policy Compliance
One of the challenges top corporate travel management companies face in managing corporate travel is ensuring that there is policy compliance. Employees don’t comply with a travel policy primarily because they find the guidelines ambiguous or difficult to comprehend.
Additionally, they may not have real-time access to the policies while booking or creating an expense report, which is another major cause of policy violations.
You can achieve policy compliance with the best business travel management software. With the help of such company travel software, you can set up multi-level granular policies based on departments, travel destinations, employee levels, and airlines, among others.
Business travelers can also access them in real time during booking, minimizing the risk of policy violations. Additionally, they receive real-time notifications if they incur out-of-policy expenses during their travels.
4. Ensures Business Travelers’ Safety
Employee safety is of utmost importance during business travel as they are exposed to a wide range of risks. Female business travelers especially are at higher safety risks than their male counterparts. As a result, it is crucial for travel managers to equip employees with the appropriate tools and information necessary for their safety.
The best corporate travel management software provides employees with safety features such as live location access, safe hotel identification, and real-time alerts. The travel management platform allows travel managers to track their employees’ precise location and ensure their safety, even in new or strange locations.
5. Access to Business Travel Analytics
To optimize corporate travel management, it is crucial for travel managers to monitor key performance indicators (KPIs) related to travel, such as departmental spending, employee satisfaction scores, compliance with policies, and costs per trip.
These metrics help identify improvement areas and allow corrective actions to be taken. The necessary travel data can be obtained using corporate travel management software.
Modern corporate travel management software offers advanced business travel analytics by consolidating all travel data onto a single dashboard. These personalized dashboards enable travel managers to access real-time travel data conveniently.
For instance, travel managers or company owners can find out which are the most preferred airlines or hotels by employees. This will give you an idea to negotiate better deals with them when employees travel next. The business travel management software also provides customized reporting for different departments as per their requirements.
Therefore, the best corporate travel management software can give you in-depth insights and help you make informed decisions.
6. Integrates with Third-Party Applications
Various departments within a company, such as HR, finance, administrators, and travel managers, are typically involved in the organization’s travel management process. And usually, these departments use separate company travel software or applications to manage their respective processes.
You must retrieve the data manually from each system and upload it into yours. This is a very time-consuming and tedious process.
Therefore, it is imperative that you integrate your travel management system with other third-party applications or software.
You can resolve this issue with the help of SaaS-based corporate travel management software. The business or company travel software can easily integrate with various third-party applications to facilitate smooth data flow. For example, if you need any information from the HRMS tool, you don’t have to extract it manually.
When new information is updated in the HRMS tool, the data automatically gets populated on all corporate travel platforms. This helps you save a lot of time and effort.
7. Improves Productivity
The conventional method of managing business travel is time-consuming, tedious, and cumbersome. For instance, the travel or finance managers must manually check the itinerary, trip request, and associated costs. Moreover, the process involves the exchange of numerous emails between employees and approvers. This whole process is very tedious and inefficient.
Travel managers can overcome these issues with the help of a unified travel management solution as it automates all the repetitive tasks. Moreover, the best corporate travel management software providers also use mobile applications available on both iOS and Android phones.
Therefore, employees can easily send travel requests and submit expense reports from their mobile devices. Based on the request, you can either approve or reject the request by phone at anytime, anywhere.
This way, the corporate travel management software saves a lot of your time, and you can utilize this time for other important tasks.
Best Corporate Travel Management Software: An Industry-wide Comparison
Now that you know the benefits of choosing the best travel management software for your travel process, you might be wondering which one is the best.
Having such a wide variety of options available can make choosing the right company travel software solution difficult. Therefore, to make it easier for you, here is a comparison of the three most prevalent options.
You can review the pertinent features and select the travel management app that fits your needs.
ITILITE
The ITILITE travel and expense management software is a complete solution to a company’s business travel challenges. Corporate travel platforms offers customized flight and hotel booking options on one platform, enhances policy compliance, and provides detailed spend insights with advanced reporting.
Top Features:
- Company-preferred booking options: recommends company-preferred, policy-compliant flight and hotel options to travelers while booking.
- Extensive global travel inventory: offers the industry’s best travel inventory of flights, hotels, and car rentals at the best prices by partnering with significant vendors.
- Granular policy configuration: enables administrators to configure detailed travel guidelines according to departments, employee level, etc.
- Third-party integration: integrates with Finance, HRMS, CRM, and other systems for smooth sailing data sharing and reimbursement.
- Advanced travel data reporting: collects and summarizes the entire travel data on a single, dynamic dashboard and multiple custom reports, all available free of cost.
- Virtual Travel Consultant: offers AI-based virtual corporate consultant- Mastermind conducts industry benchmarking of travel spending and suggests ways that can help optimize your company’s travel spends to increase travel savings.
- Corporate Cards: offers virtual and physical cards with pre-configured spending limits and money back.
- 7-star rated free travel support: provides 24/7/365, human-powered customer support free of cost across calls, chats, and email. Live agents respond within 10 seconds and resolve the issue within 60 mins.
Pricing:
ITILITE follows a pay-per-trip model wherein you get a “clean price” for each trip. The price quoted for each trip is inclusive of all the services like booking, itinerary management, flight cancellation and re-scheduling, and 24/7 support.
- Travel: The team of experts at ITILITE specially designed the Travel plan for companies seeking business travel services exclusively. The plan costs $9.99 per trip. A trip may include any number of flights and hotels booked in one request. You can also avail of this plan for $6.99 per trip if you opt for the pre-paid wallet as the payment method. To learn more about the discounted pricing system, talk to the experts now.
- Travel and Expense: The integrated Travel and Expense plan is built to help companies manage both travel and expense seamlessly from a single platform. It costs $9.99 per trip and $7.99 per active user on a monthly basis. However, you can get significant discounts through wallet payments or with an annual payment cycle. To learn more, get in touch with the experts.
TravelPerk
TravelPerk offers an all-in-one travel management platform that travelers can use to book flights, accommodations, and transportation. Corporate travel platforms also enable efficient expense management and 24/7 business traveler support. It empowers corporate travel booking companies with cost control, streamlined processes, and an enhanced travel experience.
Top Features:
- Simplified travel booking: provides the option to book flights, hotels, cars, and trains from one platform.
- Extensive travel inventory: helps you find multiple travel options for your business trips, including flights, rail tickets, car rentals, and more.
- Flexible cancellation: provides up to 80% of the cost back for canceled bookings up to 2 hours before travel.
- Carbon offsetting: offers a dedicated sustainability team to help you manage your travel-related carbon footprint.
Pricing:
- Starter: In this plan, the first 5 bookings are free each month. After that, you will be charged 5% of the total trip per booking. The minimum booking fee per trip in the starter pack is $2, and the maximum is $30.
- Premium: The premium plan costs $99/month + 3% per booking. It offers everything in the starter plan, along with other benefits.
- Pro: The pro plan is slightly more extensive than the Premium plan. It costs $299/month + 3% per booking and provides everything in the Premium plan along with a few added advantages.
- Enterprise: This plan offers custom pricing for companies with a large travel budget and intricate travel requirements. To get the details regarding this plan, you need to get in touch with TravelPerk’s team.
Navan
Established in 2015, this Palo Alto-based company offers a highly user-oriented corporate travel solution with a technology-first approach. Navan combines AI and a modern, user-friendly design. The platform evolved into a multi-faceted business solution that facilitates high-end corporate travel management.
Top Features:
- Travel Management: helps corporate travel booking companies manage travel seamlessly with global inventory, worldwide travel agents, booking and itinerary management, and an online booking tool.
- Corporate Cards: offers virtual and physical cards with pre-coded controls like spending limits and unlimited money back.
- Travel Reporting: provides a unified dashboard for all company expenses.
- Global Support: offers 24/7 automated support via call, chat, and email.
Pricing:
Navan offers a Travel Only plan exclusively for travel management and a Travel and Expense Plan for integrated T&E management.
To learn about each plan’s pricing, you have to contact Navan’s team.
To Sum up
Here is a summary of the features of the most prominent corporate travel management software solutions to help you select the right one for your company:
| Feature | ITILITE | Navan | TravelPerk |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 app for booking travel and reimbursement | Yes | No | No |
| Dedicated accounts manager | Yes | Yes(at extra charges). | Only in premium and pro plans. |
| Travel support | 24/7/365 free live support via call and chat in less than 10 seconds and via email in less than 60 mins. | 24/7/365 support with a $25 fee per request for a live agent. | Free live support is available. |
| Savings through employee incentives | Yes(on flights and hotels). | Yes (limited only to hotels). | No |
| Per trip booking fee | $9.99 ($6.99 with wallet) | $25 | Minimum $2 fee for bookings less than $70. You will have to pay $30 fee for bookings with higher amounts. |
| Subscription fees | Nil | Upwards of $500 annually. | $99- $299, depending upon the plan. Can be more than $299 for the custom plan. |
| Cancellation and rescheduling | Live agent support available for both cancellation and rescheduling. No additional fee. | No fee for self-served cancellation. Additional charges if live agent support is required for cancellation. | Live agent support available for both cancellation and rescheduling. |
AI-powered Virtual Travel Consultant to boost cost savings | Yes | No | No |
| Cashback | Up to 2.5% cashback | Up to 1% rebate | Cashback |
Employ the Best Company Travel Software for a Seamless Travel Process
It’s high time that travel managers ditch the traditional methods of managing business travel and switch to the best and most advanced travel management app or software. The corporate travel management software helps you optimize and seamlessly manage your corporate travel management process, thus saving time and money.
ITILITE’s SaaS-based business travel management software can help you enhance your company’s business travel management process. At ITILITE, we offer a lightning-quick booking system, cost-efficient flight, and hotel options, a virtual travel consultant, an itinerary based on employees’ preferences, and many more. We also provide 24/7/365 business travel support for employees if they are stuck in any emergency without any additional fees.
To know more about our advanced features, get a free demo now!
