In the post-pandemic age, your company and startup can generate incremental revenue by investing in corporate travel. But you can make the business trips successful only by meeting and managing your organization’s corporate travel needs. As a framework or structure, corporate travel management helps you improve employees’ business travel experiences and control travel costs while handling business trips.
You can simplify and streamline employee travel management through automation. The right corporate travel management solution will boost the travel experience by providing employees with self-booking tools. Likewise, the software will help your finance team prevent policy violations and get actionable insights by analyzing travel data.
While automating corporate travel management, you have the option to choose from many software solutions. The corporate travel management software differs from each other in many aspects, including accessibility, usability, update frequency, and security.
Also, you must consider and compare the key features of the software solutions to decide if the corporate travel management solution meets your organization’s needs.
12 Features to Consider for Choosing the Right Corporate Travel Management Solution
1. Usability and Accessibility
Employees can compare and book flights, accommodations, and car rentals effortlessly when the corporate travel management solution’s UI is simple and interactive. Hence, it is always important to choose a corporate travel management solution that is easy to use and configure. Also, the software must provide employees with access to relevant information and guidelines as they book business trips.
Another factor to look out for in a business travel management software is that employees can access the software using any device — desktop, laptop, smartphone, or tablet.
2. Travel Policy Implementation
Your choice of corporate travel management solution must be customizable enough to facilitate travel policy implementation. The feature will help you with conditional and customized travel policies.
You can keep in place travel policy checks to ensure that employees do not violate travel and expense policies while booking and spending.
3. Approval Workflow Customization
Employees need the approval to book their travel options from the approving managers. However, the approval process can be tedious and take a lot of time.
You should choose a business travel solution that supports a custom approval workflow. The approval flow can be customized as per employee level, departments, destinations, or out-of-policy requests. The software will route approval requests to the appropriate approver according to the preset approval workflow.
4. Managed Travel Booking
Most corporate travel management solutions feature self-booking tools. Employees can use the tools to book flights, hotels, car rentals, and other business travel products.
But you should opt for software that facilitates managed travel booking. The feature will ensure that employees get the required support while comparing and booking business travel inventory.
5. Large Business Travel Inventory
Options are one of the important things business travelers want after the COVID-19 pandemic. You can boost the business travel experience of employees by allowing them to choose from multiple flights, hotels, and car rentals.
Certain corporate travel management solutions these days allow your employees to access an extensive travel inventory. They further use AI to recommend the appropriate options to every traveler according to your organization’s travel and expense policies.
6. Negotiated Corporate Rates
You can save a significant percentage of travel costs when employees can book travel products and services at discounted rates. The leading travel management companies often make clients leverage negotiated rates by consolidating supplier relationships.
While comparing corporate travel management solutions, you should check if the provider creates opportunities for your employees to choose from multiple travel booking options at discounted rates.
7. Multiple Payment Options
While booking business travel, some employees use corporate credit cards, while others use their personal funds. But the choice of payment option differs across employees.
You can simplify and speed up work travel booking for employees by choosing a solution that supports multiple payment methods — debit cards, credit cards, digital wallets, and online banking.
Moreover, it is also essential for the corporate travel management solution to implement ACH payment for expense reimbursement. This ensures that the reimbursement is done directly into the employee’s bank account without hassles.
8. Travel Expense Processing
Some of the widely-used business travel management solutions these days feature expense management tools. You should opt for unified travel and expense management software to make it easier for employees to get travel expenses reimbursed.
Employees can use the expense management feature to generate and submit expense reports in minutes. At the same time, the travel and expense management solution will help your finance team to automate travel expense approval, detect policy violations, and prevent travel expense frauds.
9. Data Security
Your organization will use travel and expense management software to store and process sensitive data of employees and vendors. Hence, it becomes essential to choose a software solution that comes with robust security features and uses data encryption technologies.
The feature lets employees securely share their personal and financial information while booking travel. Also, the data security certification will ensure that the software protects both enterprise and employee data from targeted security attacks.
10. Enterprise Tool Integration
You can make the most of the corporate travel management solution by integrating it with your organization’s existing software applications. For instance, you can integrate the software with the HR system to save important travel information for employees.
Likewise, you can streamline expense reimbursements by integrating the software with your existing expense management solution. The cloud-based business travel management solutions can be integrated with your organization’s existing software solutions using application programming interfaces (APIs).
11. Actionable Travel Insights
Data analytics create opportunities for you to improve travel experiences and reduce travel costs by leveraging large volumes of travel data. You can simplify travel data visualization and analysis by choosing a corporate travel management solution with built-in analytics.
The actionable insights gained using advanced travel analytics will help you refine travel policies, control travel costs, prevent policy violations, and boost traveler satisfaction.
12. Customer Support
While comparing corporate travel management solutions, you must focus on keeping work travelers safe and stress-free in the post-pandemic age. It is always important to shortlist software applications that enable employees to get the duty of care anytime and anywhere.
Many corporate travel management software providers offer duty of care through customer support. Hence, you need to choose a provider that offers round-the-clock and omnichannel support. The feature will make employees travel for business purposes safely and confidently.
Conclusion
You have the option to choose from many corporate travel management solutions. Some of these solutions come with features to automate business travel management, while others automate both business travel management and travel expense management. You should opt for travel and expense management software to automate two interrelated processes simultaneously.
