5 simple steps for streamlining travel management

If corporate travel management is part of your daily grind, then you probably receive dozens of emails a week with travel requests, questions about itineraries, flight booking issues, last-minute changes, cancellations, and a whole slew of scheduling complications, especially when it comes to group bookings.

Rather than answer a million emails (and risk dropping the ball or missing out on seats because you didn’t get to your email fast enough), why not move travel management outside of your email inbox altogether?

A good travel management process involves tracking and at-a-glance management of the entire travel process. This way, you can see what trips need to be booked and finalized, which ones are ongoing, which have passed, which team members are traveling when, and so on. Spoiler alert: this doesn’t happen in your inbox.

Turns out, there are better ways to manage business travel than with email. We’ll show you how with 5 easy steps to improve your travel management process.

1. Identify priorities for everyone involved in the travel process

Business travel is one of the most complex expenditures of any business. Each trip has different goals and purposes, and each person involved with the trip has different priorities. Identifying those priorities from the outset can help you develop a streamlined process that keeps everyone’s goals and needs in mind.

For example:

The business traveler wants an itinerary that doesn’t cause unnecessary sleep-loss, a comfortable room with WiFi, and maybe an extra day to explore a new city and turn a business trip into personal travel – a.k.a a “bleisure” trip.

The office manager needs a travel policy that works and a travel management solution that doesn’t take too much time away from other tasks. The travel booking process should be seamless: they shouldn’t need to open hundreds of tabs or contact loads of travel consultants or agents just to book flights.

And finally, the finance manager needs instant access to all travel spend so they can make budget decisions in real-time and optimize cost savings.

Depending on how your company travels, you may have additional factors or people to keep in mind. Before you revamp your business travel management process, start by listing out all of these factors in detail and making sure you know what everyone needs.

2. Use a booking platform that allows travelers to book their own travel

Taking care of your business travelers is key to a successful travel management program. If your team isn’t happy, then the travel booking process isn’t working.

One thing that travelers absolutely love is the ability to book their own travel arrangements, especially without having to double or triple check their travel plans against company policy.

This gives business travelers many benefits, such as:

They don’t need to bother the office manager or travel manager for a simple booking.

They don’t need to write complicated emails or fill out forms with multiple itinerary options.

They can choose the itinerary they want and how they would like to travel (car rental, booking on different airlines, taking a train etc.).

They can choose their preferred airlines and lodging.

They can track their frequent flier programs.

An online booking platform tailored for business travel can help ensure travel policy compliance.

Ultimately, self-booking allows travelers to save time, save administrator’s time, and get the options they want within the predetermined travel budget.

Fujifilm, for example, transformed its travel management process by empowering travelers to book their own trips—read the full case study to learn how they did it.

“Travelers can book their own trips and do everything autonomously. In the past, we always had a travel request that needed to be completed before you could use the platform to make the actual booking. TravelPerk saves us a lot of time, because it's now all done in one step. It's a huge benefit for the bookers and the travelers. Plus, the approvals are really user friendly and quick.”

Lydia de Kousemaeker, - Strategic Buyer and Travel Manager at Fujifilm Europe B.V..

Use a booking platform that allows travelers to book within policy automatically or to save desired trips that an administrator can then finalize if you need more control. This way, an office manager or travel manager can review inside the platform which requested bookings are incomplete. No more back-and-forth emails!

Not sure where to get started? Here’s how to choose the best business travel agency to help manage your business trips.

3. Streamline your policies and approvals process

A major benefit of using a corporate travel booking platform is the ability to have your company’s travel policy and approvals set up to automatically filter trips for employees based on policy.

As you get your platform and booking process set up, make sure you include the following policy factors:

Price guidelines or limits based on the city of destination

Travel insurance requirements

Guidelines based on traveler group (such as team, role, office, or country)

Required level of control (pre-approve all trips, no trips, or just ones of a certain price/length)

The person who is approving each traveler/team (the team lead, project lead, or travel manager?)

Discover how Fieldin got nearly 100% travel policy compliance after switching to TravelPerk

Some companies choose not to be strict at all, allowing every employee to book out of policy if they need to, and just let the admin know via notification.

Then there are companies, mainly in traditional industries, that prohibit booking outside of policy, and in those cases, they have the admin book it for the traveler just like a travel agent.

The granularity of your corporate travel policy and the flexibility of the approval workflow is super important for a travel program that works, and you need to find the best balance for your company, have the data to improve it, and make sure your platform allows it smoothly.

You want your booking platform to be able to encompass the full spectrum, so you can do what works for your company culture and unique travel needs.

4. Help travelers access direct support

As a travel manager or office manager, you’ve undoubtedly received calls and emails outside of normal business hours from travelers who are experiencing problems during their trip. It could be lost confirmation numbers, the wrong room type… anything.

When your office manages all company travel manually, your team ends up being responsible for all of these incoming support problems. This doesn’t make travel management easy for you or your travelers. Travelers might hesitate to contact you and not get the help they need. On the flip side, they could be frustrated if you don’t answer on a Sunday afternoon.

Giving business travelers direct access to a travel support team is a great way around that. One way that businesses often solve this is to work with a travel agency, but this doesn’t allow for the self-booking process and user experience that travelers love. Instead, it means they have to talk to a different person to book, which makes the travel agency process flow still pretty clunky.

However, it is possible to outsource travel support without having to sacrifice self-booking. Use a booking platform that includes quality 24/7 support for every trip, and you (and your travelers) will breathe easier. Unfortunately, the vast majority of legacy corporate booking tools, travel agents, and travel management companies all provide very low-quality customer support that has been outsourced.

“Travelperk has been 10/10, definitely would recommend, especially if you are trying to book multiple flights or multiple hotel rooms for a company. The fees are minimal, the help is always available and they do everything they can to make sure your trips are successful from start to finish.”

Kelly Sprow, , Business & People Operations Manager at Intelletec

Travel support from your travel management system also often includes risk management and traveler safety support that can give everyone — from corporate legal to travelers themselves — some peace of mind.

With TravelPerk, for example, you get access to our end-to-end duty of care solution. It makes global business travel easier on your company by alerting traveling employees automatically about travel risk, disruptions, or other changes or notifications about their trip.

This makes the travel experience much easier for employees too — and gives them the travel options they need to feel safe and secure abroad.

Look for a tool that has invested in training in-house support representatives who are available around the clock. Reviews from sites like G2 and Capterra can help give you the inside scoop on whether the customer service is worth its salt. Make sure that this contact information is readily available to all your travelers at all times.

5. Optimize your travel spend

Because business travel is such a complex expense, it’s become very common for administrators and managers to have limited knowledge of its current travel costs.

A CFO or finance manager might know the exact travel expenses three months down the line, but knowing what’s going on today? Really tricky!

However, not knowing the current state of travel expenses isn’t good. This means the finance team can’t make immediate budgetary decisions and is always playing catch-up, trying to cut costs after the fact.

A travel agent or TMC is a bit better. They’ll send monthly reports on travel data, but without the immediate ability to login and review spend, the finance team is still in the dark.

A great travel management platform, like TravelPerk, gives your teams immediate and real-time insight into travel bookings and expenses. This means your finance team can track spend and help with reimbursement procedures. Real-time data can also help generate accurate and actionable expense reports that they can then use to lay the foundation for their future travel budget.

“Now, I can go through the reconciliation process in three hours, which is huge since much of our spending is travel-based. TravelPerk has made it so much easier”

Ryan Sumblin, - Head of Accounting at GMG EnviroSafe

Of course, monthly and quarterly reviews of travel are still important. Finance and operations will want to review the impact and worth of various trips and the corporate travel program as a whole. Good travel management platforms will provide historical data on travel patterns, sustainability, and costs too.

Immediate visibility isn’t the only factor that allows for informed finance decisions. Granular data is important as well. Without being able to break spend out by project, team, office, etc., then any travel spend KPIs become impossible to manage.

So look for a travel management platform that supports both real-time data, historical analysis, and granular reporting where you can analyze spend by category to track and analyze KPIs.

Optimize your travel management process

The bottom line?

Your travelers want easy booking procedures — preferably with online booking tools they can use themselves. Your office administrators or travel managers want to save time and be able to effortlessly enforce company travel policies. And your finance team needs real-time data into travel spend and expenses.

TravelPerk is a travel management software that includes all of these features—making it super easy to improve your travel expense management process, save administrative time, ensure policy compliance, and make travelers happy.

Managing employee business travel doesn’t have to be a headache. Just ask Hotjar. They used to manage employee travel manually, which involved multiple days of work for each company offsite and hundreds of back-and-forth emails.

Now? Every employee can book their own flights, accommodations, and more according to their own preferences and company policy. Managers can see who has and hasn’t booked, which makes following-up and managing travel a breeze.