A variety of people can organize business trips in companies – from the employees themselves to the secretaries who book tickets. It is clear that these are not their main responsibilities.
However, more and more often, organizations are hiring specialists whose main job is to prepare business trips for employees. These people are called travel managers, and today we will talk about why such workers are needed.
The main task of a travel manager is to develop and ensure the implementation of a travel policy for the entire company. We wrote about the preparation of such a policy earlier, but now we will briefly note that this document includes rules for organizing travel: restrictions on the cost of tickets and hotels for different categories of employees, a list of reporting documents, etc.
The travel manager controls everything related to travel – from compiling lists of employees to checking business trip reports. Naturally, it is precisely such a specialist who plans the company’s travel budget, striving for its constant optimization.
Travel manager: responsibilities
Among the main daily duties of a travel manager:
- preparing a business trip – the manager must understand who is going where, what transport, on what dates, etc.
- ensure the arrival of employees at the site – ordering tickets and booking hotels, transfers, and so on;
- checking reports – the travel manager must check whether all the necessary documents have been provided by the employee after returning from a business trip;
- budgeting – it is the travel manager who best understands the volume of travel expenses and plans the travel budget.
That is, the travel manager conducts both work related to finance and resolves organizational issues. The larger the company, the more serious the workload of such a specialist.
How to optimize the work of a travel manager?
With a large number of employees and trips, there is a need to optimize the work of travel managers. Doing everything manually is clearly not the optimal approach, which entails errors and overpayments, because it is beyond the power of a person to analyze all the available accommodation and flight options.
Therefore, in recent years, companies are increasingly introducing corporate reservation systems. OneTwoTrip For Business is just such a service. With its help, a travel manager can ensure compliance with the company’s travel policy (set limits on the cost of tickets and hotels), gain access to thousands of booking options in real time, and automate the creation of reporting documents.
