(Newswire.net — December 8, 2021) — Travel across the world came to an astonishing halt with the onset of COVID-19. Corporate travel was the worst hit among the different sectors and is showing a much slower recovery than personal travel. Still, the initial months of 2021 brought about minor signs of relief for travel agencies worldwide.
This, in large part, was attributed to the timely and successful rollout of vaccinations and the freshly updated travel guidelines from the CDC (Center for Disease Control and Prevention,) which elaborated how travel was safe for vaccinated people.
As a business owner, you might be wondering how your organization can plan and reboot its corporate travel program for the year ahead. We’ve crafted this read to elaborate on the various ways companies can plan on restarting their business travel.
Let’s begin!
How can organizations prepare for the next phase in corporate travel?
- Firstly, business executives need to find ways to boost employee morale and security regarding corporate travel. For this, mapping out an efficient plan to help them seamlessly achieve this transition can prove to be a considerable boost.
- Also, with COVID-19 variant Omicron making a comeback in 2022, businesses need to pay close heed to what’s changing, which countries are closing international or even national travel, newer vaccine boosters to aid employees with, and so on.
- While coming up with preventive or corrective measures, remember to include every stakeholder in the corporate travel ecosystem, from travel agencies to suppliers (hotel chains, cab services, and airlines) to the end-users, your employees.
- Lastly, business leaders need to revisit corporate travel and reimbursement policies to make accommodations per the changing corporate travel landscape to ensure no financial leaks. This guarantees an efficient reporting mechanism around employee expense management, making it easy, irrespective of the growing physical distance between your employees.
Four different ways businesses can approach the next phase of corporate travel
Leveraging real-time data
In today’s AI-powered world, neglecting to use data for deriving insights and improving one’s decisions is like throwing a stone up a random tree and hoping for a fruit to fall. Therefore, organizations need to understand and leverage the power of real-time data to identify patterns and trends in corporate travel. This would lead to businesses making the right deals and optimizing for costs.
An online travel agency can source raw data as they’ve immense access to such aggregates. For instance, while you book an airline ticket, the agency can let you know how many individuals in your niche have reservations on the same flight.
Additionally, if you’re worried about the fluctuations in ticket prices, your travel agency can let you know which flights stay on schedule and who is more likely to change ticket prices. This naturally helps you have more control over your travel decisions.
Companies have to utilize real-time data whenever and wherever they can with technology-driven software or external agencies that can do the heavy lifting for them.
Develop an agile planning mechanism
Create detailed plans and recovery mechanisms for numerous risk scenarios. For instance, if there’s an unexpected surge in demand, you won’t have time to sit back and plan; you’ll need to act.
With this in mind, here are four pointers to consider while planning for the future of business travel:
- Firstly, identify the extent of business travel required. If your employees need to visit foreign countries, ensure they are fully aware of the updated travel guidelines.
- Secondly, to better understand how airlines’ fares might fluctuate, analyze other data points like industry trends, Online Travel Agencies, customer surveys, and pricing data from Global Distribution Systems to understand their current status as opposed to what was projected.
- Thirdly, redefine your company’s travel expense policies. Here’s a quick list of questions to help you get started:
- What are your revised mileage rates?
- Do employees still need to store physical receipts for claiming reimbursements, or will you use an automation tool like an expense report software?
- What are your revised rules on the usage of public transport?
- Are there differences in the activities that unvaccinated and vaccinated folks can approach?
- Finally, ensure your employees have all the essential information they’d need during travel: websites, emergency numbers, and other contact information.
Make employee comfort a priority
Business leaders and travel agents need to work closely in ensuring that all traveling employees have peace of mind during travel and aren’t constantly worried about getting infected.
Additionally, ensure that every traveling employee can control decisions that affect their comfort and safety.
Simple examples for this would be to have open channels of communication where employees can share and talk about their concerns – both around the pandemic itself and the consequences it brought with it. These conversations can be operational (how COVID has affected business and how they work) and non-operational (how COVID-10 has changed their personal lives.) While this may not convert into revenue, it does help employees gain trust and find solidarity with the company.
Over-communication
Travel across the world has changed – border regulations, boarding procedures, number of masks to be worn, vaccination requirements, and more. Thus, it becomes a priority for businesses to ensure that they are always in the loop regarding new changes in corporate travel.
Ensure you stay proactive in discussing new changes with your employees, from organization-wide policies to even the most granular changes to prevent any confusion in their minds.
Conclusion
As corporate travel begins to rise slowly, some employees need to adjust to the changing environment as their jobs demand.
With unpredictability taking charge as the new normal, corporate travel should be approached head first, with ease. An easy start would be automating or improving processes (like expense management or airline bookings) to help employees scale irrespective of the changes beyond their control.