Last Updated on: March 7, 2023 at 9:22 am
Corporate travel is a crucial component of business, helping entities in consolidating positive relationships and deals with other businesses while also developing a solid client base. At the same time, however, business travel costs are on a rise due to inflation and recent economic downturns. This has, unfortunately, turned many away from business travel with corporate strategy seeing its reduction as a way to reduce costs.
Turning away from business travel as a whole is not a suitable financial decision for any business. The corporate strategy needs to step away from a “one or the other” approach and try to understand how it can make effective use of resources to reorient its travel program towards more financially tenable means. According to numerous economic reports, including one by Oxford Economics in 2009, business travel contributes significantly to revenue increases within a business. In this article, we will aid you in creating a balance between the two invaluable needs of reducing business travel costs without sacrificing value.
In this article, we'll take a look at:
According to a report on Asian business travellers by Mckinsey&co, technology has facilitated a shift towards more employee-centred decision-making when it comes to the specifics of any trip. Booking independently through online agents is seen as a preferable option to the command and control approach that was previously adopted by many companies. The reason is simple: it allows them to find alternatives, compare prices, and generally can exercise greater choices.
While companies can regulate employee behaviour through the transparency of fees, autonomy is not statistically proven to not be a bad idea. Companies can impose price controls and approve suppliers, but employees should be given the choice to exercise their freedom within those broad limits. With the concepts of gamification- where employees are rewarded for choosing low-cost options- such autonomy can help reduce business costs and save resources.
Regarding performance, cost, lead time, and employee satisfaction, booking autonomy can be very helpful. With the reduction of compliance, employers have noticed lower administrative costs and greater confidence in the employees to exercise their freedom in the realm of travel and expense management.
As referred earlier, research on ABTs has shown that incentivizing employees to save resources is a great way of reducing costs and should be a cornerstone of corporate travel strategy. The key goal is to create a balance between the needs of the corporation and those of the traveller while also creating a level of trust between the two parties which allows the latter to exercise their autonomy in cost-efficient ways.
This policy of gamification is emerging mostly in tech companies and it promotes compliant and cost-beneficial strategies while not stifling the employee’s options. In that way, it allows corporations to save more while granting more freedom to spend to the traveller. The only catch is the incentivization, which, while lower than the costly alternative to the traveller, is efficient enough for them to nudge into the direction that the company desires. These rewards can range from cash grants and gift cards to paid holidays and trophies.
Such cost-saving techniques need to be adopted by your company since they have been shown to work through numerous research.
Business travel timelines are usually very turbulent because they depend on predetermined scheduled meetings that often have to be rescheduled. Therefore, you can save a lot of time and money by planning travel with flexibility in mind. To avoid getting penalized for short-notice cancellations and other such fines, you should install a digital corporate travel program, which is clear and accessible to all parties involved.
Through the use of clear guidelines, advanced planning that can allow you to purchase early bird offers that have fewer- or no- penalties, electronic submission of travel expenses which save time and money, and possibly the use of travel management services, you can implement a timeline for your travel which would save resources very efficiently. Travel management services especially offer subscriptions that are much cheaper than and much less rigid than the timelines you would have to implement through your company.
The use of travel management companies such as TruTrip can help you achieve the three ways mentioned above while also streamlining the travel process and reducing your workload. Through their connections with the travel industry, TMCs can allow you to avail of cashback partnerships, promos, and lower prices. In addition to this, there is also greater flexibility when it comes to TMC and you can save up to 80% of your travel costs through the subscription packages in refunds if you want to cancel plans.
Lastly, Travel Management Services tend to be integrated management solutions to your travel policy issues. As such, they allow you access to the latest automated technological solutions and therefore reduce costs. It also empowers companies to have 24/7 visibility of their travel logs and expenses and provides VIP services to keep everything up to date. Through the optimization of user experience in such ways, Travel Management Services are affordable and modern solutions to your travel issues.
Find out how you can maximize every business travel while saving cost, manpower and time. See how TruTrip’s all-in-one platform can help you, book a demo or sign up for a free trial at TruTrip!
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