(Newswire.net — January 10, 2023) — The surge in global business travel spending led to the bouncing back of corporate travel after the COVID-19 pandemic. Your business can gain a competitive advantage in 2023 by increasing the number of domestic and international business trips. However, you have to minimize the impact of economic slowdown and global recession by controlling the average business trip cost.
Corporate travel management software helps you increase the ROI of business travel by providing various features, tools, and options. Some features will help employees achieve business travel goals, while others will help your business control costs. But you must focus on a slew of factors to choose one of the best travel management software that meets your organization’s needs in both the short and long runs.
9 Things You Should Consider to Choose the Best Corporate Travel Management Software
1. Travel and Expense Policy Compliance
You can answer common questions asked by work travelers by implementing an elaborate travel and expense policy. Employees can refer to the travel policy to answer important questions like how to get travel request approvals, how to do business travel bookings, and how to get travel expenses reimbursed.
But you can control costs only by making employees access organization policies seamlessly and ensuring they comply with the organizational policies. Your business needs corporate travel management software that ensures policy compliance by making employees book the right business travel solutions.
2. Business Travel Approval Process
Employees find it challenging to make business travel arrangements when their travel requests are not approved in time. You should ensure that travel requests sent by employees are reviewed and approved as early as possible. Your business needs a travel management solution that supports a multi-tiered approval flow.
Employees must be able to send travel requests to the right approver using the software. Likewise, they can use the software to get approvals before incurring out-of-policy travel expenses. At the same time, approvers can review and approve the travel request using the same software.
3. Travel Inventory
Work travelers these days want options to choose flights, accommodations, and car rentals while making a business travel booking. You can meet employees’ expectations only by enabling them to access an extensive travel inventory. Your business should opt for the software launched by a travel management company that enables access to global and local travel inventories.
4. Self-Travel Booking
In addition to providing options to employees, you must enable them to book essential business travel products effortlessly. Your business needs travel management software featuring self-booking tools. Employees can use the tool to make a business travel booking in minutes. Also, you can speed up travel booking by opting for software that recommends the right solutions to employees using artificial intelligence (AI) technologies.
5. Duty of Care Solution
Duty of care is the moral and legal obligation of every business. Your business must safeguard the personal employees of work travelers by meeting its duty of care responsibilities. Hence, you should implement travel management software that comes with a duty-of-care solution. The feature will ensure that employees remain safe and manage emerging travel risks and unplanned emergencies by getting real-time assistance
6. Automated Travel Expense Reporting
Your business can ensure that no employee experiences stress after business trips only by reimbursing travel expenses quickly. Employees need additional time to submit paper-based expense reports. Also, the paper-based expense reports make it challenging for your finance team to reimburse travel expenses.
Your business needs travel management software that generates digital reports. It is also important to consider software that generates expense reports automatically based on the invoices and receipts scanned by employees. Also, the software should make the finance team reimburse travel expenses early by sending automated notifications.
7. Travel Expense Management
Digital expense reports will help you speed up travel expense processing. But you cannot control travel spending without tracking, reviewing, and auditing travel expenses incurred by employees. Your business needs corporate travel management that simplifies expense tracking by providing an intuitive dashboard and supporting custom report generation.
The feature will help you predict travel expenses, accelerate expense reimbursements, and understand the spending habits of work travelers. At the same time, you can use the software to ensure policy compliance, prevent travel expense fraud, and control overspending by conducting expense audits regularly.
8. Travel Data Analysis
Business travel management automation creates opportunities for your business to gather real-time travel data of employees regularly. You can leverage the travel data to gain insights that will help you improve business travel experiences and safety as well as control business travel costs.
Your business can improve business travel programs by implementing corporate travel management software with built-in data analytics. The travel analytics will make the software provide actionable insights gained by analyzing employee travel data. You can leverage the insights to increase the ROI of business travel by making the right decision at the right time.
9. Travel Cost Control
Your business will find it challenging to increase the number of business trips due to the global recession and inflation. But you can minimize the impact of global inflation by availing of flights, hotels, and other expensive business travel products at lower rates.
The software provided by a leading business travel company helps your organization control costs by making travel products available at discounted and negotiated prices. Also, you can control costs by implementing travel management software that incentivizes employees to go for cost-efficient booking options.
Final Thought
You should use your organization’s existing and emerging business travel needs as the primary criterion for comparing travel management software. But you should remember that cloud-based travel management solutions help your business curtail infrastructural costs significantly. Also, cloud-based software is easier to configure, customize, and extend than conventional software applications.
However, your business can make the most out of the cloud-based travel management software only when employees can access it seamlessly on computers and mobile devices. At the same time, you need to ensure that the software helps your employees accomplish business travel goals by keeping them safe and stress-free by providing the required features and tools.