Managing business travel is about running effective administrative, control, and compliance strategies to make corporate travel management cost-effective, provide optimal solutions, and transform every employee's travel experience into a seamless process.

Let us understand what business travel management is all about and then look into the top 10 strategies organizations can follow to lead a structured, compliant, well-managed business travel management.

What is Business Travel Management?

Business travel management refers to planning, organizing, and overseeing corporate travel arrangements for employees who need to travel for work-related purposes.  There was a time when traditional methods of managing corporate travel management were followed, and there was a huge investment of time, cost, and effort in managing such business activities.

Thanks to modernization and digitalization, now business travel is organized on a platform that in-house teams, external corporate travel companies, or administrative professionals manage. The core objective of business travel management strategies are:

• Make availability of travel options at subsidized rates
• Control the rising costs of business travel
• Create airtight travel policies
• Ensure compliance with internal and external regulations
• Integrate processes like travel expense reporting and recording
• Coordinate approvals and settlements
• Digitize business travel processes

Top 10 Corporate Travel Management Strategies for Organizations

The following are the top 10 strategies that every business should follow to organize corporate travel seamlessly and successfully:

1. Digitalize Corporate Travel Management

Digitalization and automation of business travel management revolve around transparency, compliance, controlled expenses, and easy access. The software should be apt enough to record each employee booking, with crucial details and consolidated invoicing. It helps in future planning, comparisons, and budgeting.

Digitalization also helps with travel support, 24/7 availability, guaranteed follow-up, local language support, quick escalations, and fast resolutions. Another critical aspect of corporate travel management is reporting travel spending, tracking travel itinerary details, and mapping them conducive for future reference.

2. Create Effective Travel Policies

Creating effective travel policies ensures 100% travel policy compliance. Creating travel policies has other benefits, like saving time and expenses and ensuring all processes and people are well-collaborated and focused. While framing such procedures, you must consider employing strategic travel management software to assess various costs of the trip.

Make rules related to travel expenses, ticket type, or hotel class booked. You can keep a note of time and money allocated to leisure activities. All in all, policies help streamline internal and external processes.

3. Manage Travel Arrangements

Managing your company’s corporate travels is critical for the success of each business. Management of travel arrangements includes:

• Preparing for last-minute changes
• Benefitting from amenities like early boarding, web check-ins, upgrades, luggage-related issues, VIP lounge access, etc.
• Accessing travel management software to keep a record of all corporate travel-related activities

4. Organize Group Travel

Corporate travel management is not only about managing individual plans but also managing group bookings. For several enterprises, managing group experiences seems better, as the per-person cost is reduced, and a cumulative meeting of the board or a solid representation of business activities can be planned and implemented for everyone in one go!

However, planning group travel requires experience, skills, and a strong network. Organizing group travel includes:

• Making arrangements for group stays
• Booking flight/train bookings for the entire group
• Getting the best deals
• Planning backup plans in case of emergencies or last-minute changes

5. Stay Within Budget

One of the key strategies to enable effective business travel management is to create a budget and stay within its means. Travel involves several costs and expenditures, which sometimes aren’t easy to analyze or predict. A comprehensive travel budget should be prepared, and the organization should strive to create a balance and stay within the means for every trip.

While creating a corporate travel management strategy, it is imperative to control travel spending on a real-time basis and stay within the stipulated budget. To start with, every organization must have a streamlined approval process—quick and effective approvals save time, effort, and money.

Employees should be able to access invoices to work on reimbursement processes. One key strategy is consolidating travel expenditures into one monthly invoice. This enables quick generation of reports, tracking spending, calculation of cost savings of each trip, and instant reimbursement to employees.

6. Be Prepared for Last-Minute Emergencies

You must consider and be prepared for flight delays, traffic congestion, unrecorded or emergency expenses, unexpected illness, or delay in handling manual processes.

However, by incorporating effective travel management software, you can create and manage multi-level workflows and create an accurate and quick reconciliation process to deal with such emergencies. An adequate system helps you deal with last-minute changes and make quick arrangements as per Plan B.

7. Improve Reporting and Collaboration

Traditionally, one of the biggest pain points of business travel management was keeping track of expenses, maintaining records, reporting them to the concerned department, and waiting endlessly for approvals/clarifications and reimbursements. Thankfully, it has been mitigated with automation and expert corporate travel management practices.

With the corporate travel software in place, the employees simply need to take pictures of expenses and post them on the software. The collaborative approach is encouraged among various departments to ensure quick approval and disbursal compensation process. This is feasible because of the elimination of unrequired paperwork and hassle-free processing of corporate travel.

8. Consider Relevant Logistic Details

Business travel management is all about considering the minute details of each travel plan associated with the business. Important logistical details include ticket booking, transportation, booking hotels, arraigning meals, and planning an effective itinerary for the entire trip. 

Besides personal details, you must also keep a tab on the business agenda. Note all business-related people your employees would be meeting, details of meetings and events, estimated daily budget, and significant local information like public transportation, dress code, traffic rules, cultural mannerism, tipping code, etc.

9. Improve the Traveler Experience

Simply planning and managing corporate travel isn’t enough. You must improve the employee experience by guiding them on relevant requirements like managing their tickets and stay, helping them with documentation/visa services, providing necessary equipment, tools, or presentation materials depending on the kind of visit, and taking care of last-minute needs.

Besides travel requirements, you must also ensure employees' overall well-being and health. Considering the damage the pandemic caused to people and organizations, business travel insurance is a must. You must also provide necessary tools like a good internet calling card, using which employees can communicate with their families back home.

10. Promote Recreational Business Trips

The whole idea is to conduct business and have fun! All work and no plan will surely make all employees dull, demotivated, tired, and non-productive. Every organization wants the holistic well-being of employees.

While business travel is an essential activity requiring employees to travel for work, why not have fun simultaneously? Your corporate travel should be managed effectively so that employees should look forward to being chosen for the next trip.

Create an itinerary that includes sightseeing or visiting prominent places when visiting any site for travel. Research the best places to visit or top things to do in a particular location and help employees with such detailed information.

Conclusion

It is of paramount importance to streamline your business travel management processes. The objective is to manage corporate travel's financial and operational aspects and encourage employees to enjoy the organizational orientation and leisure of business travel.

You must keep in mind the strategies mentioned above to manage business travel effectively. Having a system well managed by experts, organizations can focus on in-house travel policies and align employee autonomy compliantly with such policies. Thus, you must modernize and digitalize your corporate travel management and reap its umpteen benefits!