Managing corporate travel involves far more than booking flights and hotels. As a travel manager, you oversee every aspect of the trip, from creating seamless itineraries to providing emergency support when needed.
With all these responsibilities, saving your time wherever possible is essential. One way to reduce your workload significantly is to streamline the business travel booking process. Thanks to technological advancement, you no longer have to manually call airlines and hotels to make reservations.
You can use a corporate booking tool to get cost-efficient options at your fingertips. Choosing the best business travel booking solution can help streamline trips, cut costs, and ensure policy compliance
There are a few other things you can do to ease company travel booking. Let’s look at a few of them.
7 Business Travel Booking Tips to Help Simplify Travel Bookings
1. Set a Procedure for Business Travel
Most companies do not have a standard system for travel booking. Therefore, some employees request company travel booking via email while others do it in person. This makes it difficult for a travel manager to keep track of all the requests.
Moreover, the employees send whatever details they deem fit because they don’t know what is required. Hence, the travel managers must fetch all the employee details and preferences for business travel bookings in bits and pieces. Sometimes, they even have to contact employees personally multiple times, which takes up much of their time.
Therefore, as a travel manager, you must ensure that your organisation has a standard procedure for putting-up company travel booking requests. You can do this by creating a travel request form that needs to be filed by every employee. The form should be comprehensive and ask for all the necessary details.Â
However, a business travel request form must be manually submitted, reviewed, and approved/rejected. A better alternative is to automate the process with corporate travel management software. With the help of a travel management software travel booking requests can be raised, reviewed, and approved or rejected instantaneously.
Moreover, the software fetches all employee details and gives options based on past travel preferences, saving travel managers’ and employees’ time.
2. Book Flights and Hotels Early
Corporate travel booking is no child’s play because travel managers must ensure travel safety, comfort, and policy compliance. Moreover, employees nowadays seek a personalised business travel experience, which means that travel managers have to keep track of all of their past preferences and book flights and hotels accordingly.
However, it is no secret that flights get booked well in advance, and rates fluctuate frequently. Likewise, good hotels sell out pretty quickly. Hence, you must book flights and hotels early to ensure everything is according to employees’ past preferences and get good deals. Also, booking hotels in advance allows you to choose preferred amenities for a better experience.
You can make the best business travel bookings by staying hypervigilant on airline and hotel websites. You can also set price alerts to get notified whenever the prices fluctuate. Alternatively, you can opt for travel management software like itilite, which can help you encourage early booking of business travel with rewards or strict approvals.
To save more on travel costs, try itilite for free now.
3. Create an Inventory of Preferred Hotels
Frequent business travellers generally have a list of hotels they prefer to book. They base these preferences on factors like quality of service, proximity to the workplace, accessibility of public transportation, etc.
Hence, you must select from their preferred options whenever you are booking for a business trip. However, finding the hotel’s details while booking business travel can be a tedious task.
Therefore, you should create a detailed inventory of such hotels. The inventory should include records of the hotel’s address, rates, contact details, and travel booking process. This way, you can save time and skip the hassle of trawling emails while booking.
Moreover, finding the best business travel booking platform lets companies simplify arrangements and create a smooth, efficient travel experience for employees.
4. Create Internal Checklists
A business trip booking requires a lot of planning. You must enlist which flights and hotels to book and plan advanced booking. You must also create detailed itineraries to make additional bookings and accommodate special requests. And lastly, you need to ensure that business travellers take all the necessary safety precautions and stay up-to-date on their vaccination status, emergency contact details, etc.Â
The best way to manage all this easily is to create checklists so nothing gets overlooked or missed. You can make the following types of lists:
- Traveller information: This checklist can include travellers’ names, contact numbers, passport details, dietary requirements, travel preferences, etc. It can come in handy when looking for traveller details while booking business travel.Â
- New travellers’ checklist: All new employees can use this checklist to provide all their travel requirements.Â
- Travel itinerary: You can create a standardised template for different travel itineraries. There can be separate templates for domestic and international travel.
- Travellers’ safety checklist: You can give the traveller safety checklist to your employees to ensure they are not missing out on any critical safety item.
5. Use Virtual Reality
While booking a hotel for the first time, you rely on pictures, reviews, and descriptions to determine its quality. However, you may not always get what you see. For instance, you may find the hotel room is smaller than it looks in the picture. Or the services mentioned in the descriptions are no longer provided by the hotel.
So, how can you ensure that the hotel your business travel booking is actually good? The answer is Virtual Reality (VR).Â
With the help of the immersive 360-degree experience, you can check out the location and view even the tiniest details of the accommodation. Therefore, you can determine if it is suitable for your business travellers.
6. Apply for APEC Corporate Travel Cards
If your business travellers frequently travel to the APEC region, you should consider investing in an APEC business travel card.
An APEC Business Travel Card (ABTC) helps companies streamline the process of entry into the APEC region for short-term business travel. This card helps speed up the immigration process.
Moreover, business travellers can travel to all the APEC countries with just a single application. To complete the application, the traveller must have a valid passport from a qualifying country, have no criminal record, and regularly travel for business.
7. Gather Feedback After the Trip
Despite your best efforts, there is always room for improvement. Hence, you should seek employees’ feedback after every business trip to improve future bookings and enhance employee satisfaction. To ensure comprehensive feedback, you can ask questions like:
- How was the food and service on the airline?
- How was the hotel’s ambiance?
- What was the quality of the concierge service?
- How far was the hotel from the location?
- Was support easily available?
- How was the hotel’s quality of service?
- What are some changes you would like to see in the travel process?
Ease your Travel Booking with itilite
For the best business travel booking experience, look for platforms that offer ease of use, cost-saving features, and comprehensive support.
These are a few company travel booking tips to help you make the corporate travel booking process more manageable and less time-consuming. You can implement these tips in your organisation with the help of integrated travel and expense management software like itilite.
The itilite platform helps in the end-to-end automation and digitisation of the travel management process. The software reduces the booking turnaround time to 90 seconds by providing customised flight and hotel booking options from a vast travel inventory.
Get a free demo of itilite to experience lightning-quick and effortless business travel booking along with other advanced features.
