Before we get into this subject in detail, let us understand what ‘Unmanaged Corporate Travel’ is. Nick Vivion, Editor-in-Chief of tnooz.com defines unmanaged travel as a contemporary approach that places employees of a company above travel expense. Unmanaged travel, also known as ‘self-booking’ or ‘open booking’, often considered a major disadvantage, gives employees the latitude to pick their preferred suppliers, travel operators and booking channels. This said, unmanaged corporate travel still rests on data, analytics and insights for decision making, and make travel policy improvements recorded by expense management providers.
Failure to non-compliance:
Though unmanaged travel programs still bank on a travel policy for a measure of how much employees spend during travel, the freedom to choose preferred travel operators and suppliers gives ample room for non-compliance to travel policies. Obviously, this can lead to increased business travel costs. It is somewhat akin to asking if the employees are at liberty to buy their office furniture based on their preferences or dislikes.
Management of diverse sets of data:
The biggest catch of using a travel management company is that it gives you a diverse set of data that enables employees to make continual improvements to a company’s business travel policy. While unmanaged programs may utilize several stand-alone expenses reporting systems that offer limited data on traveller behaviour or their efforts to comparison shop for competitive rates, there is a whole range of data set beyond employee spending required to make improvements in corporate travel. Make no mistake; if you are a travel manager, you have an arduous task in consolidating this data.
Managing travel employees’ safety and health:
Many travel management companies make use of emergency communications tools and risk management information to make sure travelling employees are marked ‘safe’. An unmanaged corporate travel program has very little access to travelling employees’ whereabouts; therefore the issue of safety and health becomes a real question. Add to this when employers fail to comply with jurisdictional health and safety laws to protect the safety, welfare and health of travel employees, it can result in jail time, fines and other charges for employees and concerned employees and officers. This has motivated several companies to adopt managed programs.
If unmanaged corporate travel is creating headache for you in terms of mounting travel costs and failure to travel compliance and approval, it is time you switch to Tripeur, a cloud-based platform tool that can turn the tables on with integrated trip approval, policy compliance, advanced travel analytics, self-booking tool and employee tracker.