Some small and medium businesses still use traditional methods for travel management. However, as they grow, they encounter challenges that can slow their progress. Manual travel management can create inefficiencies and make it harder to meet increasing demands.
Firstly, booking travel manually is time-consuming and often leads to mistakes. Employees spend too much time finding flights and hotels instead of focusing on their work. Secondly, enforcing travel policies by hand is hard. This can lead to unauthorized expenses and higher travel costs.
Additionally, manually tracking and reconciling travel expenses is complex and can cause delays in reimbursements and financial reporting. Employee satisfaction can also suffer, leading to frustration and lower productivity.
Corporate travel management solutions can solve these problems. This software automates booking, ensures policy compliance, and tracks expenses in real-time. By adopting this solution, businesses can save time, reduce costs, and improve the travel experience for their employees.
List of Key Benefits of Travel Management Solution
Here are 17 benefits of implementing travel management software for your business.
1. Simplified Travel Bookings
Booking trips through various online travel agency websites can be time-consuming and frustrating. You might search for hours to locate the right flights and hotels. Often, you can’t find everything you need on a single website, forcing you to hop from one site to another to meet all your travel requirements.
This wastes valuable time and adds unnecessary complexity to the process. A corporate travel booking tool consolidates airlines, hotels, and other travel services into a single platform. Business travelers no longer need to browse multiple websites to find the perfect travel options.
Instead, they can access a wide range of choices all in one place, tailored to their preferences and company policies.
2. Business Travel Personalization
A crucial challenge you face during booking is finding policy-compliant options that match your preferences. Additionally, last-minute arrangements can often slip your mind until it’s too late. You need a way to customize various steps in the travel process according to your needs.
Travel personalization can solve these problems. One way to incorporate personalization into your travel management process is through corporate travel management solutions. Most modern travel management tools use advanced techniques like predictive analytics to assess your preferences based on your booking patterns.
They then recommend customized, policy-compliant options tailored to your needs. This ensures a smoother and more efficient travel experience for you.
3. Substantial Travel Inventory
Your employees can choose the best flights and hotels only if they have access to all suitable options. When booking from third-party websites or consumer travel apps, they often face limited choices due to a lack of a substantial travel inventory.
In contrast, the best travel management solutions source their travel inventory from a Global Distribution System. This means they have data from multiple suppliers, which all users can easily access. Additionally, you won’t need to contact numerous flight and hotel vendors separately, saving time and effort. This streamlined approach ensures your employees can find the best travel options quickly and efficiently.
4. Travel Costs Saving
Saving travel costs is one of the most important goals of a corporate travel program. To reduce your company’s business travel expenses, you must encourage your employees to book economical flights and hotels.
However, if you rely on a traditional travel agency, they can’t always provide the most cost-efficient booking options. This limits your ability to save significantly on travel costs.
Investing in a business travel management solution can help you save big on travel bookings. Top providers like itilite have partnerships with major flight and hotel vendors, allowing them to offer the best-negotiated deals. This helps you cut down a significant portion of your travel costs.
To estimate the potential savings you can achieve with a corporate travel booking platform, try using our savings calculator.
5. Advanced Analytics
Managing business travel well requires tracking key performance indicators (KPIs) like per-trip spending. These KPIs help measure how well your travel program works and show where changes are needed. Travel managers must collect and analyze travel data to calculate these KPIs.
Corporate travel management solutions collect all travel data from past trips into one dashboard. So managers can see everything without having to deal with many documents. The customizable dashboard also lets them find specific data points quickly. This makes it easier for travel managers to make informed decisions and reach their travel goals effectively.
6. Streamlined Approval Workflow
Business travel often needs approval from managers and executives. Many companies don’t have a clear workflow for trip approvals, leaving employees unsure of who to approach. This confusion is even worse for international trips, which are more expensive and need more approvals.
A good travel management solution can fix this problem. Corporate travel software helps you set up approval workflows based on trip type, duration, employee level, and department. It also automates the approval process, so requests go to the right people without delays. This makes the approval process smoother and helps employees focus on their travel plans.
7. Round-the-clock Support
Business travelers often encounter situations that require substantial support during their trips. For instance, they might need assistance finding the most convenient routes to their workplace or locating the nearest healthcare center while traveling internationally. To ensure they have the help they need, providing 24/7 business travel support is crucial.
Modern corporate travel management solutions can offer this support effectively. Many advanced travel solutions include built-in customer service chatbots. These AI-powered chatbots can provide location-based recommendations and handle minor emergencies, offering support beyond regular office hours.
In addition to chatbots, some solution providers, like itilite, offer 24/7/365 human-centric support through calls, chats, and emails. With this comprehensive support, travelers can address their concerns promptly, reducing stress and ensuring a smoother, more productive work trip.
Here is an overview of itilite avant-garde support.
To learn more about how itilite support has eased the lives of business travelers and travel managers, and how it can be beneficial for you, talk to our travel management solution experts now.
8. On-Demand Scalability
As your company grows, so will the number of business travelers, leading to an increase in travel requests and expense reimbursements. Managing this additional data and these requests using a spreadsheet can quickly become overwhelming and inefficient. Investing in cloud-based travel management software can solve this problem.
Cloud-based solutions are scalable, allowing you to handle an increasing volume of traveler data seamlessly. With these tools, you can easily accommodate unlimited user data and manage all additional bookings and expense claims efficiently. This ensures that your travel management process remains smooth and effective as your company expands.
9. Easy Access
Sometimes, a business trip doesn’t go as planned. Travelers might need to make last-minute changes, like changing their destination or accommodation. In these cases, they need a travel management platform that allows them to make changes easily, even if they’re not using their office laptop.
A SaaS-based travel management solution can handle this well. These solutions provide multi-device access, allowing employees to manage their trips from anywhere using any device. They only need a web browser, a stable internet connection, and their login details. This flexibility helps employees manage unexpected changes smoothly and efficiently wherever they are.
10. Virtual Travel Consultancy
Gaining deep insights into travel data can help travel managers identify cost leakages, optimize travel policies, and enhance the traveler experience. However, obtaining these insights often requires expert intervention. Traditionally, companies have relied on manual travel consultants, but this approach comes with several drawbacks:
- Low-quality insights due to limited expertise
- High service fees
- Time-consuming processes
- Excessive back-and-forth between in-house teams and consultants
By choosing a tech-forward travel management solution like itilite, you can access a virtual travel consultant that addresses all these issues. An AI-based virtual travel consultant can analyze historical data, benchmark against industry standards, and provide recommendations for optimizing your travel management process. These insights help you save on travel costs and improve policy compliance, all while reducing the need for costly and time-consuming manual consultations.
11. Gamification
Maximizing travel cost savings is crucial for maintaining your company’s bottom line. To achieve this, travel managers need to ensure employees select the most economical travel booking options. One effective strategy is to encourage cost-efficient bookings through rewards and incentives.
The best travel management solutions include an integrated incentivization platform. This platform allows you to reward employees who successfully save on travel costs by giving them a share of the savings from flight and hotel bookings. This approach motivates employees to choose the most cost-effective options, driving overall savings and boosting enthusiasm for adhering to travel policies.
12. Travel Expense Fraud Detection
Travel expense fraud is among the toughest to spot despite comprising 11% of the overall occupational fraud. Such scams cause your company an estimated $40,000 loss in a year. Therefore, you need a solution to detect and prevent travel expense fraud early.
You can invest in integrated expense and travel management software with a built-in fraud detection system. The software automatically verifies all the expense claims and flags duplicates, non-compliant expenses, and wrong expense categories, helping you conduct faster travel expense audits and prevent expense fraud.
13. Travel Policy Compliance
Travel policy violations are a big problem for travel managers. These violations happen because travel rules are often too general and hard for employees to understand. To fix this, you need the best travel management solution that helps you set clear, detailed rules.
The best software lets you customize these rules based on things like employee level, department, trip type, and how long the trip is. When the rules are tailored to specific needs, employees can understand them better and follow them more closely. It leads to better compliance with travel policies.
14. Error-free Data Sharing
Contrary to popular belief, travel data isn’t just for travel managers. The finance department needs this data to forecast travel costs and create budgets, while the HR department uses it to process employee reimbursements on time. Therefore, your travel data management solution should enable seamless data sharing across various applications like HRMS and ERP systems.
Modern travel management software can streamline this process by integrating with other management systems. This integration eliminates the need to manually update travel data in multiple applications, reducing errors and saving time. With smooth data sharing, you can ensure accurate and efficient handling of travel information across your organization.
15. Travelers’ Safety
As business travel resumes after the Covid-19 pandemic, ensuring travelers’ safety has become a top priority. The new generation of business travelers expects comprehensive precautions and expects their company to be highly vigilant about their safety throughout the trip.
Modern travel management solutions address these concerns with features like live traveler tracking and hotel blacklisting. These tools help ensure that employees stay in safe accommodations and provide the ability to intervene quickly in case of emergencies. By leveraging such safety features, you can better protect your employees and manage their well-being during their business trips.
16. Data Privacy and Security
Managing corporate travel involves handling sensitive information such as card numbers, employee IDs, and itinerary details. Any leaks in this data can compromise both employee and company security. Therefore, you need a highly secure solution to protect this information.
A travel management software solution can safeguard critical data through advanced cloud security. Cloud-based solutions use complex encryption and place web servers in restricted-access data centers. This ensures that your employee data remains protected from cybercriminals and other threats.
17. Sustainable Travel
Employee travel is responsible for 2% of global greenhouse emissions. Such high levels of GHG emissions are not only harmful to the environment but also tarnish the companies’ image. Hence, incorporating sustainability in business travel is crucial.
The first step you can take to curb unnecessary travel-related GHG emissions is to track your carbon footprint. An advanced travel management software solution can help you track your carbon footprint and make eco-friendly decisions. Moreover, some business travel management solutions also help you invest in appropriate carbon offsetting projects to neutralize the negative environmental impact.Â
Are You Ready to Make the Switch to the Best Travel Management Solution?
Now that you know the many advantages of investing in a travel management solution, it’s time to choose the right software for your organization. The ideal solution should deliver all these benefits using cutting-edge technology.
itilite corporate travel management tool is designed to meet these needs. With our platform, your employees can book flights and hotels in just 90 seconds, access a vast inventory of customized options, and receive round-the-clock support during emergencies. itilite also ensures enhanced policy compliance, provides advanced travel analytics, and more, making it a comprehensive solution for your travel management needs.
Try out itilite for free to get a free demo now.
