The 2023 guide to corporate travel management

Travel management is undergoing a huge shift—away from micromanagement and towards trust, transparency, and simplicity.

The fact is that “control” and “compliance” have dominated the conversation around corporate travel management for some time. And it’s no wonder. Business travel is the 2nd largest expense after employee salaries, and when managed effectively, companies earn $12.50 or more in incremental revenue for every dollar invested in business travel. It's a known business need that does come with high costs.

Today, business travelers demand easy self-booking and greater travel options. Simultaneously, companies want to reduce costs and improve the ROI of corporate travel. Having a managed travel program or working with modern travel management software can help you achieve that. 

Our guide to travel management will help you achieve all of these goals and more.

What is corporate travel management?

Travel management entails many processes. It is about controlling, tracking, and reporting on a company’s travel expenses, but it also includes everything from the detailed planning of a trip to ensuring that all booking processes are compliant with the company travel policy.

Business travel can be managed by external corporate travel agencies, an in-house travel manager or by an admin professional, such as those charged with office management. 

Regardless of the role in charge of managing travel, most businesses also rely on a corporate travel platform to track business travel expenses, among other key features.

What does a corporate travel manager do?

A corporate travel manager is typically an internal employee who manages the travel program and all business trips for the entire organization (an external resource who isn’t on staff is called a corporate travel agent).They set the corporate travel policy, handle duty of care and risk management, and help the company navigate global business travel in an efficient and effective way. 

Depending on the size of the organization, there may either be a whole team of corporate travel managers, or it might fall to someone from the HR or Operations deparments. Their key duties include:

• Booking trips for travelers (not only c-suite executives, but employees in any role).
• Helping individual departments track their travel spend so they can stay under budget.
• Providing travel support to travelers before, during, or after their trip.
• Selecting and managing any travel vendors or travel tools used.
• Working to negotiate corporate rates on hotels that the company uses often.
• Booking group travel.
• Organizing ground transportation like rental cars or rail
• Analyzing company travel spend, or delivering travel spend reports to the CFO for analysis.

What does a travel buyer do?

A travel buyer is in charge of either purchasing or outsourcing the purchasing of corporate travel. This means partnering with vendors, negotiating rates, and/or choosing a corporate travel management company and overseeing or reviewing their work.

The travel buyer typically makes decisions that impact the entire company, not just individual departments.

Stakeholders in the travel management process

Updating your travel management process and systems is absolutely a team effort. Depending on your company size, this may require collaboration with:

• In-house corporate travel manager
• Office manager or office team
• Head of operations / COO
• CFO and finance managers
• CEO
• Panel of frequent employee travelers
• Current corporate travel agency or company

Some colleagues will be heavily involved in the process (such as finance and operations) whereas others will give feedback and approval (such as frequence c-suite travelers).

What solutions are companies using to book their business trips?

So, how are companies booking their business trips? Let’s have a look at some of the most-used solutions. 

Consumer booking sites

They’re not designed with corporate travel in mind, but many businesses simply book directly on accommodation/airline websites, or use aggregators such as Expedia or Kayak.

Traditional travel agencies

Like consumer booking sites, these agencies are traditionally used for leisure trips. Most of these agencies will offer an online booking tool, but when they don’t, the customer needs to request their trip via phone or email. 

Travel management software 

Corporate travel management software is the future of business travel, and more and more companies are using it for their trips. It’s the best option for all stakeholders involved, which we’ll go into in the next section.

However, not all software used to organize corporate traveling is created equal. You’ll need to find a software that suits your company’s needs, matches your tech stack, and generally achieves its goal of making your life easier and your journeys smoother. 

What are the drawbacks of each solution?

These solutions do have their pain points, and there are various issues with using them for organizing business trips. Let’s look at the top concerns: 

• Consumer booking sites
  • Need to compare various websites and pay out of pocket in order to secure the best price 
  • Many hidden costs, with fees for cancellations and changes
  • Many back-and-forth emails when booking for companies
  • Need to pay upfront
  • No support for issues on the road
  • Time-consuming manual reimbursing and expense tracking
  • Impossible to ensure compliance with company travel policy
• Traditional corporate travel agencies
  • Online booking tools are typically buggy, with bad UX 
  • Employees end up calling support or book, when they’d rather save time by booking for themselves, with the options they want 
  • Costly service
  • Above-market transport/accommodation prices
  • Company policy compliance is difficult to guarantee
  • Lack of travel inventory and options 
• Traditional corporate software
  • Clunky user experience that travelers don’t enjoy 
  • Offshore customer service, typically ranked as the top frustration in customer reviews
  • Often overly complicated and feature-laden 
  • Impossible to control travel when travelers can’t or won’t use the tool 
  • Lacks low-price flights and hotels available online
  • Impossible to guarantee company policy compliance

The pillars of modern travel management:

• Trust – Trust travelers to book using the approved process and policy, and make it easy for them
• Transparency – Let travelers see what they’re allowed to spend and choose accordingly, and let finance and administrative teams see what is being booked and why.
• Simplicity – Create a process that works and meets everyone’s needs.
• Impact – Measure the impact of business travel on the company and reduce unnecessary trips that leave travelers exhausted and businesses with needless expenses.
• Duty of care – Ensure a thorough duty of care strategy is in place to mitigate risks for employees when traveling
• Sustainability – Being aware of the impact of travel on the environment and adopting good practices to reduce the effect

With these three pillars in place, you can bid farewell to manual, complicated booking processes, back-and-forth emails, and requests for reports.

How can a good corporate travel program help companies to save money?

There are multiple ways an effective corporate travel program can be cost-effective, as well as time-effective, for companies looking to book a trip. Let’s look at the top ways they can save you money. 

Ensuring compliance with company travel policy 

Planning a trip with a consumer booking site, or even with a traditional travel agency, makes your company much more vulnerable to breaches of your travel policy, mistakes which can be extremely costly. An effective business travel agency will make sure to dot all the i’s and cross all the t’s necessary to guarantee compliance. 

Access to more affordable flight options

Businesses that use consumer websites or traditional corporate travel agencies are missing out on the cheap accommodation and flight options. Armed with top corporate business travel management softwares which integrate hundreds of travel networks, you’ll be able to easily find and select the best opportunities for cost savings. 

Stay on top of travel spending trends

Business trips can be costly as travel expenses spin out of control, but there are ways to keep your foot on the brake. The best way to do this is to use a travel booking tool that easily integrates with your expense solution. With these tools in place, you’ll be able to track how much each employee is spending, how much each city or location warrants in terms of a fair budget, and much more.

Six steps to managing corporate travel effectively

At companies of any size, here’s how to manage corporate travel:

1. Choose a smart booking tool
2. Assure 24/7 travel support 
3. Create policies and approval workflows
4. Organize and utilize travel spend data in real-time
5. Improve collaboration between admin and finance
6. Reduce your company’s carbon footprint

1. Choose a smart booking tool

It’s no surprise that with the advent of online booking sites, businesses around the globe started to book travel on consumer sites.

Guess what happens when a business is using consumer tools to book travel? The CFO lacks oversight, and so is forced to become the bad cop. Finance departments are forced to micromanage travel spend for every department, in a way that’s overly conservative and controlling.

You can’t get the transformation without the tech. The first step in managing travel the modern way is to select a tool built on trust, transparency, and (don’t forget) simplicity.

Here are the main features to look out for in your new travel management platform:

• Self-booking within policy – Trust your travelers to book what they need, and set up policies and parameters
• Consolidated invoicing – The ability to get one monthly invoice for all travel from one vendor, instead of having it spread across the web
• Travel spend reporting – Easy access for all finance and administrative team members who need to track travel itinerary details and spend by cost centers, tags or labels
• Easy booking process that travelers love – Invoice consolidation and accurate reporting are impossible if employees want to cheat on the approved tool, so choose a tool that’s easy to use with consumer-grade UX. Make their entire travel experience, from booking to coming home, as easy and smooth as possible. Introducing a mobile app is just an added bonus!
• Great inventory – Inventory is not a side note. Make sure the platform you use has every available option you can find online and that the company is committed to adding more inventory
• Travel support – You need travel assistance that’s available 24/7 in your native language so that employees can get help even when the internal admin team is unavailable

2. Assure 24/7 travel support

Providing travel support 24/7 isn’t easy, unless you’re a vampire who never sleeps. If you’re not Count Dracula (and you like your free time), you can get hit with cancellations, changes and other requests on nights and weekends, or have these things consume your workday so that you have to work longer hours in order to wrap up important projects.

And, if you’re unavailable to help, then travelers get stuck waiting for fixes, and ultimately this costs the business time and money. The logical solution is to rely on a partner who can deliver 24/7 travel support so you, as an office manager or travel manager, don’t have to.

Here are the requirements to look for in travel support:

• Available 24/7
• Easy to reach a real human
• Guaranteed follow-up and follow-through
• Native language support
• Fast escalation for big issues

Many office managers and travel managers are still hands-on with travel (and all of its last-minute problems), and that’s great. The point is having a partner that’s available when you’re not, so you can choose what’s important for you to handle, and where you can get help.

It’s also important to mention that companies have a duty of care towards traveling employees, with a plan in place to care for them. An effective plan will evaluate travel risk, both foreseeable and unforeseeable risks, aiming to intercept dangerous circumstances and avoid legal ramifications. Traveler safety is paramount, particularly when you’re responsible for your employees.

In addition to getting coverage for routine trip support like changes and cancellations, you’ll also want to look into getting help booking group trips. Large trips of 8 or more people can really weigh down the office management team. When vetting tools, see if they’ll help book group travel for you, including negotiating on the price.

3. Create policies and approval workflows

Automating your travel policy creates a trio of benefits in your business travel management processes. You increase travel policy compliance and maintain it around the clock. The administrative team saves time because they’re no longer booking all trips. Travelers get to experience the freedom of booking for themselves.

Do certain departments, offices or specific travelers have unique travel needs? If so, your travel policy will be more complex, as you won’t have one policy that works for the entire company.

For most companies, these are the basic factors that their travel policy or business travel program requires:

• Maximum cost of airfare
• Maximum cost per hotel per night
• Minimum amount of days booked in advance
• Hotel star rating
• Flight class allowed

But that’s just the beginning! You can get more specific, such as setting clear cost control of hotels per city, for example.

Approval workflows

When setting up automated travel policies you have different options for how strict or lenient you want to be. Here are 3 very different styles, when it comes to automating policies and approving trips that are outside of the limits:

• No approval required for any trip
• Approval required for some trips
• Approval required for every trip

If a traveler attempts to book a trip that is outside of policy, you want to have a simple approval process in place. The traveler should be able to request approval inside of the app, which will notify the admin. No need to write emails!

Next, you need to decide who is approving the trips: the office manager, corporate travel manager, CFO, or multiple department leads?

For an admin who is regularly approving trips, one of the most helpful things is a platform that shows you all the trips waiting for your approval right inside the dashboard. That way you have a central location for every trip that’s still in-progress and you never have to search your email for anything.

4. Organize and utilize travel spend data

Effective corporate business travel management isn’t just for your admin team. Expense management in collaboration with your finance and operations teams is also really important. Why? You want travel spend reporting that is not only accurate but insightful!

By using cost centers, labels and by making sure all of your trips are available in the reporting tool, you can generate smart reports that will help the finance team identify trends, leaks, and opportunities for budget optimization.

• Cost centers – Does your company use different payment accounts for different geographical regions? How many cost centers does the company have? Make sure that travel spend is getting charged to the right accounts and that you're making accurate expense reports.
• Tags and labels – Beyond cost centers, are there any important filters that the finance team would have to have when viewing travel spending reports? For example, would they like each trip tagged by team or by project? Decide upfront so that the tagging system can be implemented clearly from the get-go.
• Keep all travel in one place – to get accurate travel data, you need to keep all travel in one place—whenever possible. Work with a travel management solution that integrates with providers that matter to your company, such as budget airlines, AirBnb or European train lines. If your company has negotiated hotel rates, you want your corporate solution to be able to book those rates for you, so you don’t lose the travel data by booking directly.

5. Improve collaboration between admin and finance

The most important thing in modern travel management is that it serves the whole entire company. We’ve talked about equipping travelers with stellar support. We’ve talked about saving time as an admin. So what about finance?

Here’s what the finance team wants and needs:

• Streamlined approvals process – If your approval process requires action from the admin and the finance team, try to make this as seamless as possible.
• Easy access invoices – The finance team needs to grab all invoices quickly so they can reconcile expenses and set clear reimbursement processes. The best way to do this is to use a platform that consolidates travel spend into one monthly invoice.
• Ability to track spend instantly – Consolidate all travel spend into one platform so that they can generate reports on what is being spent, by who, and why (when using tags and labels). Same as with the invoices, determine whether you need to send them a monthly report, or if they want to download it themselves.
• Cost savings on trips – Fixing travel isn’t just about saving time. Many businesses are still using travel booking platforms that were built in the 80s and 90s. This means that they markup the inventory so that the company is paying more than a consumer would! Impress the finance team by reducing travel costs and introducing consumer-grade prices for trips.

6. Reduce your company’s carbon footprint

The impact of business travel on the environment has long been clear, and demands attention. Adopting carbon footprint monitoring tools and carbon offsetting capabilities is becoming an increasing priority for companies when it comes to booking corporate trips. 

More and more resources are becoming available designed to help business travelers understand their carbon impact, choose sustainable alternatives and offset their carbon footprint. 

These resources aren’t just for clearing consciences, but for complying with legislation, which is heading more towards transparency and responsibility when reporting on a company's impact on the environment. 

Here are some simple steps you can take to implement a more environmentally-friendly travel policy. 

• Work out your starting point by calculating your company’s travel carbon footprint 
• Design a green business travel program, which creates data-driven strategies to increase employee commitment
• Choose economy class
• Reduce your fuel consumption where possible
• Pick low-emission airlines and avoid layovers 
• Vet your accommodation for sustainability practices 
• Utilize green travel tax breaks

The bottom line: it's time to upgrade your travel management

Let’s bring it all together!

Set the best travel management strategy for your company in 5 easy steps:

1. Choose a smart booking tool – Meet everyone’s needs
2. Share the burden of travel support – Don’t try to do this alone
3. Set up cost centers and labels – Let the tool reflect the business
4. Create policies and approval workflows – Put the policy inside the booking process
5. Improve collaboration between admin and finance – Grab invoices and reports
6. Reduce your company’s carbon footprint