Be it to drive alignment, foster new leads, or forge customer connection, employee travel matters for the long-term success of your business. However, if your company encourages business travel without a proper corporate travel policy in place, it can cause more harm than good to your bottom line. When travelers aren’t following company travel policy, your business loses visibility and insight into spend, behaviors, and overarching trends.
For organizations seeking to increase program adoption and have the most impact whenever travel is concerned, offering an end-to-end travel experience that’s seamless and safe is a must. By featuring traveler-friendly policies, and a solution that road warriors actually want to use, you can enable your business to gain valuable access to spend and travel trends, reduce the business expense of travel, and encourage more cost-effective road warrior behavior.
While management’s concern for the cost and risk control of a travel policy can clash with a traveler’s need to book a specific trip, the right travel program embraces and supports road warriors regardless. Read on for five common travel policy pitfalls, and gain insights into better improving your organization’s corporate travel.
1. Assuming all your individual travelers travel the same.
Your road warriors are as unique as they come. Your travel policies need to account for that. This means building choice and personalization into your policies, and enabling each individual traveler to book their trips according to their own preferences. Many legacy solutions make searching for in-policy options that are also flexible nearly impossible. By offering a wide array of available inventory and showcasing what’s in and out of policy, your employees can exercise their own independence—while still remaining within the allotted corporate policy.
2. Believing every business trip is the same.
It’s not uncommon for corporate travel programs to pigeonhole travelers with too-tight travel restrictions. This can be a recipe for disaster, because making it difficult for your road warriors to do what they do best leads to mounting dissatisfaction, and eventual employee churn. Don’t frustrate your travelers by making them choose between comfort and convenience. The right corporate travel policy ensures a more flexible, less compromising process, that enables and empowers travelers to get what they want out of business travel.
3. Not streamlining expensing capabilities.
Integrating with modern expense management technology is a must. Unfortunately, many legacy travel platforms lack these capabilities. As a result, travelers are left wallowing through T&E receipts and waiting on reimbursements, while finance teams are left in the dark until an expense report comes through post-travels. Worse still, they’re forced to manually process it. By integrating your expense management solution with your travel management, your road warriors can expense on-the-go, in clicks, and your finance teams won’t find themselves buried under stacks of late invoices.
4. Not ensuring traveler security.
Your travelers—wherever in the world they are—must be accounted for at all times. But if your corporate travel management solution isn’t being used by employees, you have zero visibility into their whereabouts. In the case of a natural disaster or emergency, your organization has an obligation to instantly locate and contact all travelers to ensure their safety. To be able to account for road warriors at any time, implement policies, programs, and tools that ensure you can keep track of all parties involved—just in case.
5. Not specifying where employees should book or manage business travel.
If your organization isn’t offering clear directions regarding business travel, chances are your road warriors are doing their own thing—possibly even forgoing the provided business travel management tool. A designated hub may meet the needs of the organization, but if it fails to consider road warriors’ needs as well, they’ll ultimately look elsewhere to book travel. And if travelers book outside your corporate system, their trips may well cost more. To avoid this, state your companies travel policies clearly, hold regular trainings and focus groups, and implement solutions that meet both the company’s and travelers’ needs.
Balancing the needs and budgets of your travelers is no small feat. But implementing more employee-centric policies, and offering solutions that work for the business traveler—as much as the business, enables the continued success of your travel program, and drives growth of your organization.
TripActions enables employees to build relationships, close deals and drive growth. Fast becoming the default for corporate travel, TripActions is the modern business travel platform that combines the latest AI-driven technologies with unrivaled inventory choice and global 24×7 365 live human support to delight employees, finance leaders and travel managers alike—all while empowering organizations to seize travel as a strategic lever for growth. Learn more at www.tripactions.com.
