An increase in demand for face-to-face interactions directly affects the trajectory we see in corporate travel. With this, there’s a higher call for travel managers to reevaluate their current business travel policy. What better way to step up your travel management process than by automating the whole thing? One easy and probably the best way to do this is by partnering with a travel management company that already has the platform in place.
There are a number of methods you can benefit from the technology a TMC platform can offer. And one of them is how you can automate your travel policy, making adherence and implementation easier and the process faster.
In this article, we'll take a look at:
No more long hours of approving bookings and stressful rejections. TruTrip’s platform offers simple ways to set up your automated travel policy. With us, your company travel policy is no longer a handbook that sits on a shelf. It gets fully implemented and allows your employees to choose how they travel while adhering to policy.
Does your finance team travel more than HR? Or perhaps, your sales team needs a higher budget to appeal to potential clients? Customise your travel policy based on your team’s needs instead of enforcing one blanket policy across your company.
You can also set them according to their demographic, their roles and their travel risk. You have full control. You can carve up a policy specific to a team of your choosing. You can easily enforce this without hassle.
It is widely construed that negotiation rates are better than open market ones. In actual travel, you’ll be surprised to know that you can save money with market rates too if not more when done right. With a smart policy at hand, you can filter out your employees’ options by only allowing them to book from an airline or accommodation that your company has existing negotiated rates with.
There are times when the policy you have set needs to be flexible. For situations like this, you can set exceptions. Not just that, you can in advance set up an exception to every policy in place. Every business venture is different and may need special consideration that is outside the policy at hand. With TruTrip, Travel managers and HR leaders can prepare an exception case beforehand with ease.
You can easily set a condition and if it meets that, then you can set an exception. Some companies allow employees to book premium seats or 5-star hotels if it’s a long trip. The magic here is that while doing so, you can still indicate the budget limit in advance for such occasions.
Another good way to save up travel costs and booking rejections is by setting the budget floor and ceiling right away.
With this feature, you can set your budget range for automatic booking approval. In the event that a booking exceeds the set budget, an approval request will be sent to the manager in charge. This way, you can say goodbye to long waits and relocate the time saved to more meaningful work.
For instance, if your flight budget is set to $1,000 and below, any booking made above this budget can either be automatically rejected or require further approval. Overall, the likelihood of your company policy being met increases significantly.
You can also allow additional flexibility to your budget for times when flight tickets are just higher in prices overall. Setting a percentage leeway allows for some control in situations like this, while still keeping bookings simple and fuss-free. Another simple way to set up your travel budget is by simply indicating just how willing you are to go above the cheapest price there is. This setup is ideal for last-minute unavoidable business trips that don’t have the luxury of time to wait for approvals.
In this case, you may want to consider just letting your employees book whichever as long as it’s only 20-30% higher than the cheapest available one.
Risks are ever-changing. There are diseases, natural disasters and even terrorism or other threats. While monitoring these is an important part of the duty of care, your policy can also be customised to block travel to certain destinations as you see fit. You can opt to block travel destinations for different teams temporarily.
With our Geopolicy feature, you can do this with ease. Not just that, you can download reports to know in length and detail the types of travel risks that each county have.
Being a travel manager could be tough, if you’re on the quest of making this process easier for everyone book a demo or sign up for free trial on TruTrip. See how automating your travel policy can work for you.
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