Managing business travel expenses while maintaining a good travel experience, is one of the serious challenges that face a travel manager. According to the Global Business Travel Association (GBTA), the business tourism expenditure worldwide is projected to return to pre-pandemic levels by 2024. In other words, it will reach around 1.48 trillion U.S. dollars (Statista).
Here we have gathered for you four life-changing tips to reduce the corporate travel budget of your company while keeping your travelers satisfied.
How to reduce your business travel expenses?
1. Clear and accessible Travel policy
A clear travel and expense policy will guide your employees and allow them to manage the travel budget. That is why you should make sure to clearly define the expense management policy. However, travel policies are most of the time pdf files that can get lost easily in the employee's email.
Opt for a travel management solution that allows you to customize the travel policy of your company around the traveler. That is to say, travel aggregators like Ayruu will help your travelers access the travel policy anytime anywhere with just one click.
Moreover, via the corporate platform, Ayruu allows you to customize the travel policy by sending specific parts to defined travelers/regions. You can modify and animate your travel policy according to preset filters.
2. A simple booking tool for business travel expenses
The majority of modern travelers (57%) want to have a single application to manage their planning and booking needs. (Booking.com, 2018) So why not reduce this budget by centralizing business travel around one travel management tool?
The best way to save money is to use a travel aggregator and centralize the business trip on one solution that can minimize expense management.
Here is a use case example comparing traditional travel management and centralized bookings for a company of 30 employees where 9 travel at an average of 3 trips per month.
You can note that companies using travel aggregators optimize their ROI by 91,22% annually.
3. Reporting features: to measure ROI
It takes an average of 40 hours per month for business travelers to reconcile their expenses and payment data. (Egencia, 2018) That is why you should choose a travel management solution that offers you data about the number of business trips made and the budget spent during each trip.
This is useful for tracking travel expenditures. Moreover, such features are helpful for the accountability team in your company.
By analyzing the travel data, companies are able to measure their return on investment and make improvements for future travels.
4. Shared transportation to reduce your business travel expenses
Making use of shared transportation is for sure a way to reduce travel expenses when your travelers are headed to the same destination. As opposed to arranging separate transport for each individual, shared transportation can be beneficial for your budget and for the traveler's psychology at the same time. Regrouping employees leads to avoiding traveler friction and burnouts caused by multiple business trips.
