If you have people that travel on behalf of your business and everyone is managing their own travel, booking and paying ad hoc over the internet, you must read this article. Why? Because even if you have just one or two key people that travel for work – the time they spend coordinating travel is costing your business time, money and productivity.
Plus, DIY travel management can hurt more than your bottom line as you’ll read here ….
1. Time wasting costs you coin
When your key team members like sales staff or executives are searching and booking their own travel, you may as well be throwing your hard-earned cash out the door. When your team is booking travel randomly over the internet and trying to manage things themselves every minute and every dollar counts. In fact, our calculations indicate that a business that makes around 50 travel bookings per month is losing over $10,000 annually on wasted time by doing it themselves.
Book your travel through a dedicated business travel provider and you’ll save time and money on every booking and your people can get back to doing what they do best – helping to grow your bottom line. Not convinced? Let us show you the evidence!
2. Lack of visibility puts travellers at risk and costs you more in the long run
When your travellers are booking trips will nilly over the internet – how do you know where they’re travelling to, who they’re booking with, how much they’re spending and if they’re at risk? It’s difficult to provide support for your travellers if you don’t know where they are at any given time. If a severe weather event occurred – how would your business know which travellers were impacted? If you have staff for your business, you are legally obligated to provide duty of care for travellers.
And if you can’t see how and where your travel dollars are being spent, you have little control over spend, trip approvals or power to leverage a corporate rate with a supplier.
A business travel provider, like Corporate Traveller, will show you how to gain visibility of your bookings and spend with the help of an online booking tool. When all bookings are made through a single online platform – the consolidation of bookings makes it easier for you to report on your bookings, providing complete transparency into spend and activity.
3. DIY travel management is stressful for your staff and impacts productivity
Feel like your EA or your internal travel coordinator gets a little snippy sometimes? Derr… no wonder why! Booking and managing business travel for your boss or anyone, let alone a group of people can be stressful. Generally, EAs or internal travel arrangers already have a full-time workload and then travel is thrown in on top of that. When you’re booking travel for other people, there’s a lot of back and forth with colleagues or managers, time spent on searching for options, making the booking, paying and then liaising with the traveller. Not to mention if there’s a travel disruption in the middle of the night or flights get cancelled last minute, who’s responsibility is it to manage this?
Partner with Corporate Traveller and you’ll be appointed your own dedicated Travel Manager to handle the overflow work, difficult requests and last-minute cancellations. Plus, your people have access to Corporate Traveller’s mobile travel app, which keeps travellers updated always. From travel disruptions and alerts to weather updates and information on the traveller’s departure gate, flight time changes and where to collect baggage – this app is a must-have!
4. Who’re you going to call when there’s an emergency, Ghostbusters?
If you have a mobile workforce, you must have 24/7/365 global travel emergency assistance. This one’s pretty important and pretty straightforward.
When you’re a Corporate Traveller customer, your travellers have access to local and experienced travel support no matter what time of day it is and where they’re located. One click on our mobile app or a phone call and we’re there for you.
5. Business productivity drops without the right technology and tools
When you go it alone managing business travel, your company is missing out on all the amazing tools and technology that have been specially designed to help businesses just like yours. Think mobile apps that are always on, so you don’t have to be, online booking tools powered by AI that remember all your preferences for fast bookings, tools to help you track where your travellers are, alert them of any incidents and then reporting tools which show you just how much your spending on travel. Oh yeah – now we’re talking!
6. You’re missing out on exclusive deals, corporate rates and fares
One of the coolest things about having a dedicated travel manager is that your business is the first to know when exclusive deals or special industry airfares are released. Plus, because Corporate Traveller is part of the global travel company, Flight Centre Travel Group, your business has easy access to a global network of airfares, rates and ground transport options. We’ll also show you how to leverage your room night volume or flights to secure specially negotiates rates or fares for domestic or international travel.
7. Your payment processes are adding to your costs
One of the true advantages of booking with a specialist business travel provider is the advice they’ll give you about payment methods. If your staff are paying for their own travel and then being reimbursed or you’re using a few different credit cards to pay for travel – how much are you paying in credit card merchant fees each year? You’d be surprised how much these fees actually cost your business.
Book through Corporate Traveller and your business has access to a line of credit as part of an invoice account. This removes the need to pay merchant fees and frees up your cash flow. Boom. A cash saver right there!
8. Without a travel policy in place you’re up a creek with no paddle
If you don’t have rules or processes in place for your company’s travel, your people will be left drowning in paperwork and emails and your budget easily blown. A travel policy puts a framework in place for what is permitted when it comes to who can travel, class of travel, hotel rates, how to pay for travel, who books travel, how much is permitted for meals and what your team does when there’s a travel emergency. An easy-to-understand and succinct travel policy is one of the first things your business needs if you have even one person that travels.
A policy for travel is like pasta to Italians. Si?