As the country has become more industrialised, positioning itself via companies and startups that can compete on the global stage, business travel in Singapore has gotten increasingly popular. The evidence for this lies in the numerous events that connect Singapore with global business leaders and entrepreneurs, such as the recently concluded 2022 edition of the Singapore FinTech Festival, which is the largest of its kind in the world.
To join the hordes of leaders exploring business travel in Singapore, you must be able to harness business travel technology. And today, life happens on our smartphones, and there is no reason to settle for a sub-optimal business travel experience when the technology accessible via smartphones can raise the quality of your employees’ travel experiences.
Real-time travel risk alerts help you ensure their safety while they are out on company business. Making orders for essential services like meals and commutes helps them stay focused on the day’s business, instead of running errands. Paying for services via their phones enables easy expense tracking.
These and many more are the ways in which mobile apps can transform any corporate travel management. And as a travel manager, knowing these travel software solutions and what they do will help you deliver comfort and ease to your travelling employees.
In this article, we'll take a look at:
Moovit is a full-service mobility app that integrates all your commuting needs into one platform. By partnering with local transport services in Singapore, Moovit enables you to book trains, metros, buses, ferries, cable cars, etc. with ease. It prides itself on a Mobility-as-a-Service platform that makes multimodal trip planning possible.
One of the primary challenges for business travellers is how to manage their on-the-ground commute while on assignment. Singapore, in particular, as a large, industrialised society, has intricate urban centres that can get travellers lost, especially when they’re new in the city. As such, many travellers and travel managers prefer to make all commuting arrangements in advance, using platforms like Moovit.
The true strength of Moovit is not that it simply enables corporate travel booking, but that it is a fully featured app through which you can receive real-time alerts with live directions, make transport fare payments, and track your trips. The journey planner allows you to view all the available transport options and see the best routes.
TruTrip is that one app that consolidates all your corporate travel management needs under one umbrella so your employees can enjoy seamless business travel in Singapore. With API integrations, you can connect other apps and programmes to your TruTrip software, so no detail is missing in your plans. For instance, connecting an accounting application like Volopay helps you enhance TruTrip’s expense reporting features for you to have full visibility of travel spending.
TruTrip also helps you save up to 30% of your business travel costs by identifying and optimising spending measures. The app collects travel inventories from around the world and finds the best deals on flights, hotels, local commutes, workstations, and more. More so, real-time information on travel risks and safety needs helps you keep your employees safe while they are out representing the company.
With automation, the TruTrip app can help you enforce your organisation’s business travel policy directives by defining approval workflows and specifying managers in charge of various aspects of employee trip coordination. This ensures that you can balance flexibility with the regulation of travel spending at all levels of the company.
Anyone who has been involved in corporate travel management knows how difficult it is to keep expenses in check. Even after making detailed and well-thought plans, unanticipated expenses can throw you off guard. Therefore, it’s important to have a system that enforces financial control, and Volopay helps businesses achieve this.
Volopay is an automated accounting app with various financial tools and services to help businesses manage payments and regulate spending. The list includes issuing corporate cards (both physical and virtual), vendor payouts, employee reimbursements, and expense approval. More so, Volopay can be integrated into your travel management platform, such as TruTrip so you can coordinate all things related to employee trips from a single app.
By tying an app such as Volopay into your business travel policy, you can enforce and automate rules guiding payment approvals and employee spending while on official assignments. This enhances the efficiency of the HR and Finance teams because they will no longer be bogged down by dull admin tasks that software could have run in no time.
Travellers who are new in town need adequate information on where to find basic services as well as how to make their stay comfortable and enriching, in general. With the Visit Singapore travel app, you can organise all your needs for business travel in Singapore from the comfort of your phone. Visit Singapore is more than a tour guide, showing locations for recreation and leisure, it is a comprehensive app that helps you find where to eat and drink, accommodation, where to shop, how to get around, and even Wi-Fi and internet connectivity, among others.
The app also provides general information about Singapore so that travellers can get used to the uniquely beautiful culture of the country. The traveller essentials from Visit Singapore include details about travel requirements, currency exchange rate, religious facilities, weather information, and local restrictions on activities like smoking, etc. These are basic but highly useful facts that will make your stay in Singapore as comfortable as possible.
Perhaps the best feature of Visit Singapore is that, based on your current location, the app helps you find the best deals on accommodation, tours, and local attractions, as a way to save money and get the best out of what you’re spending.
Grab is an all-in-one platform for accessing various essential services from a single app. Grab has an efficient riding and delivery system that allows you to get around town quickly as well as have food and groceries delivered to your location. One Grab feature that business travellers will find particularly useful is the GrabExpress solution, by which you can send packages, documents, and other items securely, and with real-time tracking.
But Grab does even more than these. It is a super app through which you can make cashless payments online and physically, find hotel accommodations, and even earn rewards with every transaction. For anyone who is travelling to Singapore, especially on a business trip, this is a must-have app. It is already highly popular in Southeast Asia and many people won’t hesitate to recommend the app.
Grab is essentially an app for everyday activities that would instead have taken a hassle to complete. While employees are on business trips, it is important that they are able to focus on the issue at hand and broker important partnerships for their companies, rather than getting distracted by errands.
Business travellers deserve a comfortable and rich experience and providing that for them as a travel manager requires equipping them with the right technology and tools. To get started with harnessing mobile technology for your corporate business travel strategy, sign up for a free trial on TruTrip.
TruTrip streamlines booking, management, and reporting for hassle-free business trips.