The Challenges of Business Travel Management and How to Overcome Them

Business travel has made a surprising comeback after the pandemic. In addition to allowing non-essential business travel, enterprises have been increasing business travel spending. But corporate travel will always remain one of the most complex business processes. Your organization will find it challenging to make business trips successful despite increasing business travel budgets.

You cannot get a higher ROI without meeting business travel needs fully and managing business travel programs efficiently. At the same time, you have to explore ways to overcome many corporate travel management challenges. We are making it easier for your organization to get higher returns by discussing common business travel challenges and their solutions.

Major Business Travel Management Challenges and Their Solutions

Challenge: Accessing extensive domestic and international travel inventories

Solution: Employees expect your company to support self-travel booking. In addition to choosing their preferred business travel products, your travel policies must allow them to book a business trip. Your business can meet employees’ expectations only by accessing extensive domestic and international travel inventories.

You can access wider travel inventories and provide self-booking tools by partnering with a travel management company. Likewise, you can implement travel management software that provides varied travel choices and self-booking tools to employees. But you need to ensure that the company or software extends the travel inventory using the Global Distribution System (GDS).

Challenge: Controlling the average cost of business trips

Solution: In the near run, employees will engage in business travel in environments marked by the economic slowdown and global recession. Your organization can increase the ROI of business travel without controlling the average cost of business trips. You can curtail average business trip costs significantly by getting flights, hotels, car rentals, and other business travel rates at lower than public rates.

You can get corporate rates in several ways. Firstly, your in-house travel manager can get corporate rates by negotiating with vendors or suppliers. Secondly, you can partner with a travel management company or implement a travel management solution that makes expensive travel products available at lesser than market prices.

Challenge: Delivering real-time information during business trips

Solution: Most countries have removed COVID-19 restrictions completely. But countries revise COVID rules for travelers from certain countries. Hence, employees engaging in international business trips need to know the latest travel rules and restrictions. Likewise, they need real-time information to manage common business travel risks like flight delays and flight cancellations.

Your business will find it challenging to ensure that real-time information is delivered to each employee before and during international business trips. But you can deliver real-time information, restrictions, and alerts to individual employees effortlessly by implementing travel management software. In addition to delivering real-time information, the software will help your employees get assistance whenever the need arises.

Challenge: Meeting the duty of care obligations

Solution: Your organization is legally obliged to protect the personal wellness of employees when they travel for work. But your organization needs comprehensive duty of care resources to keep employees safe and help them mitigate risks during business trips.

Most businesses these days meet the duty of care obligations by partnering with a travel management company or implementing travel management software. But you should prioritize companies or providers that offer comprehensive duty-of-care solutions by partnering with global health and security service providers.

Challenge: Streamlining travel expense management

Solution: You should remember that employees experience stress after business trips when there is a delay in travel expense reimbursements. But you need to ensure that the finance team ensures policy compliance and prevents travel expense frauds while processing expense claims submitted by employees.

Your organization can streamline the travel expense management process only through automation. The expense management solution will enable your employees to submit automated expense reports. Your finance team can review automated expense reports and reimburse travel expenses quickly.

Challenge: Implementing and enforcing multinational travel policies

Solution: Many companies these days support domestic and international business travel. But they often find it challenging to enforce multinational travel policies successfully. Your organization can control costs only by keeping international business travel guidelines stricter than local business travel rules.

You can tackle this business travel management challenge by implementing separate policies for domestic and international business travel. Also, you can ensure policy compliance by implementing travel management software that shows only in-policy business travel products to employees and detects policy violations.

Challenge: Preventing various types of travel expense fraud

Solution: Enterprises often find it challenging to get a higher ROI on business travel spending due to travel expense fraud committed by employees. Employees these days easily commit travel expense report fraud by escalating expense amounts, showing fictitious expenses, and mislabeling personal expenses.

Your business can identify and prevent various forms of travel expense fraud only by leveraging new-generation technologies like artificial intelligence. You can overcome this challenge by investing in a travel management solution that detects policy violations and expense fraud using intelligence technologies. Also, the software sends automated alerts to the finance team each time an employee tries to execute travel expense fraud.

Challenge: Leveraging travel and expense data fully

Solution: You can detect emerging business travel trends, control costs, and meet employee expectations by leveraging real-time travel and expense data of employees. But you must invest in tools to store the real-time data in a centralized location. Also, you need a robust data analytics tool to analyze a large amount of data and get actionable insights.

You can make data-driven decisions by investing in travel management solutions featuring built-in data analytics solutions. The software will unify the travel and expense data of employees. You can track and review the information by generating custom reports using a dashboard. Also, the software will provide you with actionable insights regularly by analyzing large volumes of real-time data.

Conclusion

Your organization can get a higher ROI by tackling existing and emerging business travel challenges successfully. You can overcome common challenges of business travel management by deploying an in-house travel manager, partnering with a travel management company, or implementing travel management software. But you should focus on solving these business travel management challenges while evaluating these options.