Do you know how much your organization has spent on business travel in the last month? The last year? What about travel policy compliance among your most active travellers? A recent survey conducted by the Global Business Travel Association in partnership with Roomex found that keeping track of travel spend was a major organizational challenge for 30% of Travel Managers, while policy compliance was the number one headache, accounting for 60% of all respondents.
Whether your business uses a company card to pay for travel, pays by invoice with each hotel or even tasks employees with expensing their trips, reconciling all these costs and keeping on top of spend can quickly become a daunting task for your Finance department. Often, businesses will not be able to accurately track their overall travel spend, and with that comes the risk of soaring budgets and even fraud.
Roomex have partnered with Allstar to streamline this process and make keeping track of travel spend simple. Our all-in-one travel platform is built for the mobile workforce, enabling Travel Managers and Finance Directors to book accommodation, manage expenses and consolidate spend into a single invoice. What’s more, Roomex users can now lodge an Allstar Plus card into the platform to enable weekly invoicing for all travel spend, including accommodation, meals, expenses and even train travel.
Allstar Plus is a unique ‘all-in-one’ business credit and fuel card providing you with one payment method and one invoice making it easy to manage on and off the road expenses. The Allstar Plus business credit card helps you to stay in control with spend limits tailored by card and allows you to manage expenses in real-time with digital receipts.
According to the survey, the full list of organizational challenges faced by Travel Managers is:
- Compliance enforcement – 60%
- Traveler satisfaction – 51%
- Keeping track of all company travelers – 38%
- Keeping track of travel spend/budget – 30%
- Unsuitable accommodation types – 17%
- Spending too much time browsing websites – 16%
- High Travel Management Company fees – 11%
With these challenges in mind, here’s a few tips on how to make travel management easier, safer and more efficient in your organisation:
Create a comprehensive travel policy
You might be surprised to learn that 40% of companies don’t have a travel policy at all. This is the biggest mistake in expense management, since it allows colleagues to spend without any guidance - and is subject to abuse. However, putting a travel policy in place will help to instantly reduce the cost of business travel and encourage compliance.
Streamline your booking method
One of the major costs in business spending for travel is transport and accommodation. If your corporate travel policy falls short on these elements, you can expert to incur the financial repercussions. A well-thought out travel policy will include a process for making hotel and transport bookings that are within budget. If you use a streamlined self-service platform like Roomex, you’ll be able to benefit from exclusive hotel rates and the ability to pay only after checking-out, which helps with cashflow.
Link your travel policy to your booking platform
Roomex offers the option to input your travel policy (including cost caps, star ratings and more) into the platform. Doing so will inform bookers and travelers if their choice of accommodation is within their business’s travel policy at the point of booing. It also unlocks visibility into how much of your travel booking is within policy, which travelers are booking out of policy, and more, in the free-to-use RoomexAnalytics suite.
As a final thought, it’s easy to think of a travel policy as a corporate requirement, but it’s so much more than that. It’s an extension of your business and company culture, which forms part of the crucial employee experience. Making it easy and stress-free to make and amend travel bookings, as well as quick and easy processing of expenses, goes a long way in employee satisfaction scores. Combining a platform like Roomex with the Allstar Plus card unlocks a wide range of benefits for businesses with a mobile workforce.
Get in touch today to find out how Roomex and Allstar can help you save time and money on your workforce travel.
May 26, 2022
