Corporate Travel Management – 2 Min Read

Is your company using outdated business travel management tools? Watch out it can cost your company several thousand dollars per year and time working on administrative tasks, as per a new study. Research studies conducted by Lola.com prove that there’s a strong link between business travel and business success; this said companies need to rethink the way travel is managed by them.

Studies also show that frequent business travelers cite archaic travel policies and poorly designed booking tools for not staying within the designated travel policies. While a growing percentage of employees do not prefer using outdated travel management tools and policies, others even prefer consumer sites for managing business travel instead. This, to most employees, has negatively impacted job productivity and satisfaction as a result.

A lot of valuable time is lost when employees spend hours researching, adjusting, booking and cancelling trips, in addition to reporting travel expenses, filling expenses claims and making travel reimbursements. Just imagine the time spent by an individual if he makes nine trips on an average per year. Try to crunch the numbers. It was also found that small and mid-size companies need to spend more amount of time on travel admin compared to larger firms.

The issues, the study found, were varied ranging from lack of a single integrated platform and suitable support, lack of any tools, no or less support if the company does offer any travel management tool to over-dependence on documents, receipts and spreadsheets. Travel managers do agree that conventional approach to travel management has led to lost hours of work, whilst also seriously denting bottom line.

Conversely, the same study showed that adopting a good travel management tool improved job satisfaction—even in small and medium businesses. Only a small percentage of respondents could agree less. The results indicated that poor travel management could also lead to job losses, as a worst case scenario—this number is more pronounced in the case of SMEs.

Conclusion:
This research study effectively links good travel management with business success. In fact, the more effective travel management is, the higher the success rate of business. It is unfortunate that companies are not living up to the expectations of their workforce depriving them of proper tools and support costing corporations and enterprises a lot of money big time. Even retention of good talent is becoming challenging due to poorly managed business travel.