Today we’ll talk about what business travel automation should look like and how to evaluate the effectiveness of implementing the appropriate tools.
Connect the online booking system
The first thing you need to start with is to choose one of the existing reservation systems on the market. You need one travel service provider, otherwise you will spend a lot of time combining data from different sources and comparing them.
One of the most functional and convenient systems for organizing business trips is OneTwoTrip for Business. With our system, you can access thousands of travel options (air and train tickets) and hotels. Employees responsible for organizing travel will be able to pay for flights, travel and accommodation, as well as generate reporting documents from one interface.
Develop a travel policy
Travel Policy is a regulation used to organize business trips. This document specifies all the parameters of a business trip: how flights, accommodation, etc. are organized
To optimize expenses, you need to specify cost limits in as much detail as possible: how expensive tickets can be bought, what hotel rooms to book. The travel policy also indicates things, such as cases in which you can take more expensive tickets —for example , there is a risk of cancellation of the trip, and in this case it is better to take a more expensive, but returnable ticket.
In addition, it is necessary to create regulations that will help standardize reporting. Employees should be clear about what proof of expenses they will need to provide upon returning from a business trip.
Use analytics
Another important advantage of digital booking systems is the ability to see changes in prices for tickets and hotels over time.
To reduce costs, it is worth analyzing prices in the areas you need to identify patterns. For example, on different days of the week or seasons, the cost of flights to the same cities can vary significantly. In the event that specific deadlines are not so critical, having such knowledge will allow you to save a lot.
It is also important to take into account your own experience. For example, if in your company trips are often sudden in nature and are also often postponed or cancelled, then using the booking system you can find refundable tickets – they will be more expensive, but in the end they will reduce losses in case of trip disruption.
Conclusion
Automation of business trips and expense reports is an important process that consists of several stages. First, you will need to choose the system itself – we wrote about how to do this here. Then – develop a travel policy and reporting regulations. All this will help to seriously optimize the speed and cost of business trips, and even better results can be achieved with the help of analytics.
