If a business keeps the same painfully slow business travel management workflow process in place because it’s what everyone’s used to, there’s a problem.
Innovation isn’t limited to products or services; it can be massively beneficial to internal procedures as well. Travel bookers who have adopted business travel software and online business hotel booking solutions are seeing a profound impact on their work.
The benefits are manifold, including the ability to centralise booking, consolidate payment and invoicing, manage employee requests, and gain unprecedented visibility with easy access to all your booking, usage and cost data.
Business travel is expected to ramp up across the world so enterprises of all sizes will need to find ways to reduce and manage costs that don’t rely on cutting out trips altogether.
Business travel software – and more specifically online solutions for booking and managing workforce hotels – nicely fit that bill.
How business travel software benefits your office
Inefficiency is a primary source of unnecessary spending. Today, Travel Managers book business trips and workforce travel by dealing directly with hotels, or by using multiple online consumer travel tools or offline travel agencies – which leads to hours spent manually comparing prices, managing bookings and reconciling employee expense claims.
There are many issues with such a piecemeal approach, including an inability to guarantee bookings and rates, a lack of visibility and control, and process inefficiencies that consume valuable time.
The right online booking solution, tailored to the needs of business, empowers travel bookers to compare hotels on a single digital platform that has access to business-specific rates not available on consumer-focused sites. It ensures that the company is always getting the best rate available and often results in an average of 12 to 21 percent savings on hotel bookings.
By centralising the hotel booking process, Travel Managers and finance departments instantly replace the hassle of multiple invoices, receipts, and employee expense claims with a single monthly invoice for all workforce hotel accommodation. In addition, they’ll have all the data on which hotels have the best deals in one place. It makes it incredibly easy for them to track this information and streamlines their process, allowing them to get rid of stress-inducing Excel spreadsheets.
Modernising business travel management workflows is the only way to keep up with the changing demands of businesses – who desire more insight into the booking process – and maintaining a spending policy that’s in line with the budget.
How business travel software benefits the rest of the business
While the average employee may not recognise all the work that goes into booking business travel and hotels, the process itself has an impact across the company. There’s a lot of moving parts, from invoices to corporate policy and everything in between. By hosting the most time-consuming processes – hotel booking and management – on a digital platform, the rest of the workforce is able to see the real value specialist business travel software provides.
Take reporting, for example. When done traditionally – with spreadsheets in particular – cross-department collaboration is incredibly difficult. CFOs may have to wait days for the travel booker to find the time to aggregate the data and provide a report. With a digital solution managing it, administrators can access vital information in real-time.
Furthermore, staff who are looking for information or updates on their schedules won’t have to contact the travel booker directly. All information is hosted on an easy-to-use portal, giving the remote workforce quick access to their plans so that they can be fully prepared for their journey.
Corporate policies are the backbone of an organisation that’s run effectively, but they’re difficult to implement in traditional business travel management workflows. With multiple people involved in the process and no clearly defined structure, important information can fall by the wayside. Under a digital platform, travel bookers can clearly define the policy and enact tighter controls to curtail spending when it makes sense, as well as enforcing a better approach to duty of care.
Finally, adopting business travel software allows Travel Managers to turn the hundreds of monthly payments and receipts into one invoice and one payment – making it easier for travel bookers to track, and for CFOs or financial teams to process spending. Naturally, this leads to better productivity across the board, which becomes a competitive advantage that pays dividends on the company’s bottom line.
When you put it all together, it’s obvious how business travel software can radically transform the way organisations approach business travel for the better.
