Last Updated on: March 7, 2023 at 9:24 am
Travel management companies (TMCs) are beneficial for helping businesses coordinate their corporate travel. However, due to modern demands, the most important offering of a TMC must be an integrated platform that brings together all relevant corporate travel tools so that businesses can streamline their business travel management processes.
Businesses use different software and systems to coordinate their corporate travel, including expense management, booking and booking confirmation services, and expense mobile apps. These tools often work independently of each other, meaning that they are not integrated together. Today, travel management companies can make use of integrations, which are connected tools that interact with the central business travel management platform to exchange data for a more hybrid and holistic organisation of trip planning processes.
A single platform brings together all the different systems, accounts and tools that your company uses for managing its travel needs into one place. It also includes features such as analytics or reporting, which allow you to keep track of how much money you’re spending on business trips. This gives you better insight into how you’re using your resources, which in turn helps you make better decisions about how to plan employee trips.
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Business travel is a significant driver of the economy, but it comes with an environmental and social impact. However, at this stage, sustainability is a global business priority. And, as a result, it is an increasingly important consideration for business travellers. To be precise, 90% of business travel professionals identify sustainability as their company’s priority.
Integrating sustainability into business travel management can be challenging because it requires companies to change their mindset about how they do business and how they think about the environment. With business travel still heavily dependent on carbon-emitting transport options (in particular, air travel) today, 100% carbon removal remains a lofty dream, even despite the most earnest commitments to emissions reduction. However, while companies can focus on decarbonising their operations, they can compensate for their emissions by funding climate action projects.
To effectively get rid of carbon emissions in business travel, your company can partner with platforms like Patch, which helps businesses compensate for their carbon footprint by supporting projects around the world targeting environmental sustainability. Projects range from afforestation and direct air capture to kelp farming and bio-oil among others. More so, Patch’s API makes you estimate your carbon emissions and removal directly from your mobile app. This helps you to see in real-time how each action contributes to or regresses from your company’s sustainability objectives.
When you use a travel management platform to manage your corporate travel, you expect to save time and money. You also hope to improve the quality of your employees’ experiences. However, one challenging task remains managing costs. Travel managers and HR leaders need to keep track of expenses and review them regularly to ensure that they are in compliance with the company’s policies.
Travel management companies can help you manage your expenses more efficiently, but not without the proper integration of a dedicated financial accounting platform. For example, Volopay’s collection of financial tools helps businesses manage all corporate spending from a single platform. When you integrate business travel with such a platform, what you get is streamlined and more efficient management of travel spending.
In particular, using TruTrip on Volopay gives you access to a corporate travel management portal from which you can keep track of travel expense reports, process reimbursements, pay flexibly, and access exclusive travel deals. Of course, this comes in addition to TruTrip enabling you to automate travel approvals, create travel policies, and organise itineraries for various hierarchies of employees as a business travel management platform. In short, this integration eliminates the need for employees to use multiple tools for different purposes.
Travel managers are best placed to discuss the ever-changing nature of business travel. The ability to easily access all of your travel information in one place is invaluable when it comes to managing an organization’s travel program. But what about the flexibility that travel managers and HR leaders need? The ability to change plans at a moment’s notice? The ability to provide real-time updates to the right people at the right time?
One of the main challenges in planning business trips is that things can change quickly and trips can be rescheduled or cancelled within a moment’s notice. However, with TruFlex by TruTrip, business travellers can cancel their trips up to 24 hours ahead for any reason and still enjoy an 80% cash refund.
Despite business travel now picking up the pace along with the progressive recovery the world is making from the COVID-19 pandemic, we still live in times of travel uncertainty. What TruFlex offers brings real peace of mind to business travellers and travel managers who now don’t have to worry much about the repercussions of sudden trip changes. Indeed, in case of such, you might be able to access flexible travel policies from airlines and hotels. However, such options are not reliable and are often only available to premium customers. TruFlex breaks that barrier by offering you genuine travel flexibility and satisfaction.
If you’re wondering how these integrations can work together to supercharge your corporate travel planning, book a demo or sign up for free trial to see what to expect when you adopt TruTrip as your business travel management partner.
TruTrip streamlines booking, management, and reporting for hassle-free business trips.