3 ways to easily manage your business travel spend

Are you a finance professional who is responsible for managing business travel spend at your organization? If so, does this situation sound familiar?

You’re trying to get better control over your company’s business travel approval process and budget, but it’s turning out to be more difficult than you thought. Right now, you have expense reports and booking requests coming in from all over the place.

Team members usually book their business trips individually. Each person uses different booking sites in search of the best deals. Since these bookings are often made last minute, you don’t really have much visibility over how much people are spending over the long term. 

Business trips often end up going over budget, and you have a feeling the company could be saving a lot of money if you had a better way to manage business travel expenses. You just aren’t quite sure where to begin. 

Without a centralized method of managing business travel spending for domestic and international travel, getting a handle on your corporate travel budget can feel impossible. Luckily, there are solutions out there that can help.

Here’s how you can start easily and effectively managing your company’s travel spending, as business travel returns to pre-pandemic levels:

1. Assess your current booking workflow

The first place to start is by evaluating your company’s current process for booking business travel (including air travel, rail travel, car rental, and accommodation).

If your organization is new to corporate travel, perhaps you don’t have a formal business travel program in place yet. Or maybe you do have some travel booking policies, but you don’t have a process to make sure employees are following them.

Some organizations use a business travel agency (also known as a traditional TMC, or travel management company) to help with corporate travel management. However, this approach isn’t always as cost-effective or flexible as you might like.

Traditional corporate travel agencies often charge recurring monthly fees, regardless of whether services are used that month, and may ask their clients to sign a binding contract with a minimum term of one year. They may also add on extra fees for concierge services, phone bookings, or specific transactions. In general, travel agency costs can be high, and sometimes unpredictable. Travelers also won’t have much autonomy, and may not have access to quality customer…