5 Great Ways To Help Minimize Your Travel Spend
It has been predicted that international business travel spending will exceed more than $1.6 trillion by the end of 2020. There are nearly 500 million business trips per year in the United States and half of the business travelers do not inform their organization of what flights they have booked or where are they planning to stay.
Sometimes, business travel expenditures and non-compliance can lead to high costs exceeding allotted budgets. But, with the right management strategies and technology, businesses can systemize, save, and make business travel programs easier.
Here, we present few ways on how C-Suite can minimize business travel spend.
Organize Your Business Travel Program
A streamlined booking, expense, and risk management enhances end-to-end supervision of travel management. Travel managers valuable insight into the business travel policies, backed up by data can bring about major improvements.
Moreover, an organized business travel program ensures that your organization remains safe and secured from legal or financial damages. Few travel management platforms include automation technologies that detect and notify travel managers about out-of-policy bookings, and provide them with up-to-date information.
Do Not Keep Your Business Travel Policies Unchecked
Corporate travel policies are always evolving. The technologies used for management should present new ways for connecting, conducting business overseas, booking and should ensure that the corporate travel program is responding to the market changes along with capitalizing on opportunities for cost saving.
The improvements made in the policies should be backed up by data, and that is why a business travel management program with proper reporting and analytics capabilities is highly essential.
Play an Active Role in Travel Management
Very few Chief Financial Officers report that they have a good relationship with travel managers. In order to build strategic improvements to business travel policies, strong collaboration between C-level executives and the people who oversee travel program in an organization.
Senior executives must take an active role in travel management program whether it be a collaborative analysis or by collecting immediate feedback from travelling employees.
Virtual Meetings
Face-to-face meetings are important for a business but teleconferencing with co-workers and clients in various cities is much cheaper and easier. There are many services to choose from such as business Skype, video conference, and WebEx.
These services may not be helpful for sales calls but in case of routine check-ins, these serve as a good alternative. Webinars help in different kinds of training, mostly seminars which allow several employees to attend.
Simplifying the Process of Expense Reporting
A streamlined travel and expense app allows automatic expense entry while eliminating post-trip paperwork that can be one of the most stressful parts of a business trip.
With an automated expense report, there is no need to worry about losing paper receipts and eradicating duplicate costs. The tool will also ensure full compliance and provide accurate reporting histories with full audit trails.
To Sum Up
Business travel savings may sound like a challenge at times especially when you have a large number of employees flying to various destinations. But there are numerous methods to keep travel costs low without compromising on traveler safety and services. A smart process in place can help in reducing costs on every business trip and make stakeholders as well as travelers happy.
