Traveling for a business can be challenging at times, but experienced travelers know that they can have a better experience whenever they follow a set of rules that will work for them. After all, stress quickly builds up when you are a corporate traveler, especially when you don’t enjoy the trip and have to enter many meetings.
Moreover, business travel can be hectic to manage at certain times. Additionally, things can quickly get out of hand when you have to book accommodation, flights and manage ongoing costs. At the same time, work trips can be highly productive and an endless pleasure for employees, and an excellent lasting experience.
Well, don’t go anywhere because, in this article, we will discuss the top five best methods you can use for effectively managing your business trips.
5 Ways to better manage your business trips
Manging large requests with automation
Many businesses will have a particular person in charge who is responsible for monitoring all travel activities within the company. There’s always a dedicated travel manager in larger businesses who is usually part of a finance or administrative team.
Especially when company travel is common, it becomes challenging to do everything on your own. You’ll have continuous requests from everywhere, and travelers might not always follow the proper procedures. One to message to another, and worse is that you might be having employees visit you and distract you from your work.
Well, automation doesn’t let this happen. Being a travel manager isn’t easy, and the two things that cost you the most are your time and effort. Dealing with employees to figure out the tasks they need to complete requires lots of time, and above all, one of the biggest time killers is trying to set up a travel policy.
Every question costs time for the travel manager, and every mistake makes things even worse. The more time consumed, the more team members will feel de-motivated to complete tasks. They might even start to skip a few steps and ignore a few rules, and what can we do about it?
Moreover, you can convert your travel policy into a travel management system, and nobody will have to remember anything or ask a bunch of questions that consume time.
The actual result of this is to manage travel bookings with minor or even no errors, and not only that, this helps the administrative team have more free time instead of having to panic about what needs to get done. Additionally, employees can book trips on their own and plan what works best for them.
You can include any restrictions if needed and limit budgets. There is plenty of flexible and user-friendly software that allows you even to restrict suppliers if required. So, you don’t need to start from scratch!
Make travel arrangements
Planning business travel should be your top concern when going on the road. Initially, you should familiarize yourself with your travel policy, and considering this; you are traveling for business purposes, not personal ones, so you must comply with these terms.
Booking your travel involves doing so by car, air, rail, and even by boat. There are many things to manage while doing so, such as balancing out travel times with costs, visualizing the steps of the trip from point A to point B, thinking about the journey, the time it takes to fill out the paperwork, the amount of luggage storage available, and more. Moreover, you must pay close attention to budget limitations in your travel policy.
Additionally, let’s not forget about the small details. Will leaving earlier be more time-efficient for your first meeting? Will there be Wi-Fi on the plane? The small details make you carefully prepared and be more confident during corporate travel.
Manage your expenses
Managing your expenses manually isn’t easy, especially if you have many expenses to manage. That’s why not to consume too much time and get things done much quicker; it’s best to use a business travel expense software. Business travel is all about balance, and most of the time, you’ll find your finance or travel manager having to face a huge workload.
According to statistics, 96% of employees think that empathy is an essential trait in employee loyalty and retention, so you should prioritize being attentive to your workforce. Travel expenses software helps you take large workloads off the back of your travel and finance managers. It allows them to properly manage corporate spending and provides a much smoother experience to the travel manager.
Most business travel expense software will offer third-party integrations, and if they don’t do this, you should consider using another solution. Integrations are an important part of the travel management process, and the tools you choose to integrate should be:
- Travel-management software
- Time-tracking tools
- HR tools
- Calendar software
- Team management software
- Accounting software and more
Integration capabilities will differ, so it’s essential you choose the right one that integrates with everything you require.
Set up and book accommodations
Preparing your business travel is considered half the job. Above all, you need to make sure you choose the best accommodation based on your business requirements. For example, if your travelers have a meeting to reach and limited time, try to find a good hotel nearby, rather than stressing travelers to be more than half an hour away from the meeting. Additionally, you can consider using Google Maps and measure the distances between the meeting area and the hotels you are looking to book, the distance to the airport, and much more.
Whatever you do, ensure that you check with your travel policy and see if there are any limitations on booking any accommodations. If you have a partnership with hotels, you may get a good deal out of it. Especially when looking to lower costs, having partnerships with hotels is beneficial. However, if you are more concerned about choices than costs, it’s a whole different story in that case.
Additionally, you want to pay special attention to what hotels offer. For example, what time breakfast is served, 24-hour room service, Wi-Fi, and many other things. Above all, it’s always an excellent idea to identify what hotels offer before purchasing. You can then compare them with each other.
Conduct in-depth research about your travel destination
Going to a new place is fun, but at the same time, it can be pretty disturbing when you don’t know anything. Sometimes, you may be entering a danger zone and not know of it, or a well-known city for stealing, and many more things we don’t know of. Depending on where you are going, it’s essential to know the current situation in that area.
Additionally, we don’t just mean getting informed on the political situation of the area you are traveling to, but also paying attention to the different cultures in that destination. Each country, or city, has its own culture, so you want to avoid behaviors that may provoke someone. Moreover, it’s essential you research the differences in behaviors. Some examples include:
- Not tipping a waiter may be an offense in the country you are going to
- The country you are traveling to doesn’t speak much English, so it’s important you use some basic phrases
- The country you are traveling to don’t like handshakes, and more examples you can think of
- Maybe arriving late may be a considerable offense to the destination’s culture
- Throwing trash in the street may be expected in the destination you are traveling to
There are many examples to include; however, it’s always important to do extensive research. Consider watching YouTube videos or talking to a local that’ll inform you of what to do and avoid doing when traveling to their local area.
Wrapping it up
That’s all for this article. Hopefully, you got a clear understanding of how you can better manage your business trips. Even if you aren’t the one traveling to a destination, you still have to ensure your team isn’t going through a hard time while being there. After all, even though it’s corporate traveling, you still want to make the experience stress-free for your team.
Luckily, we live in the digital age where software can do more than a human being. As a result, we don’t have to spend endless time trying to delegate our travel management work or even manually manage travel expenses, bookings, and much more on our own or by our travel managers. Do all of this, and you should be doing fine and have a stress-free experience while on the road!
Digital Web Services (DWS) is a leading IT company specializing in Software Development, Web Application Development, Website Designing, and Digital Marketing. Here are providing all kinds of services and solutions for the digital transformation of any business and website.
