As a nearly $2 trillion a year industry, international corporate travel is a pivotal part of supporting a robust business strategy.
The process of corporate travel can be costly, time-consuming and challenging to navigate, especially given the many moving parts and limited room for error.
Access Agility and Efficiency
For a travel strategy to be practical, it needs to be agile. However, spending time and resources on navigating changing travel regulations, insurance, travel delays, and cancellations is rather impractical.
Furthermore, because you’re unable to dedicate the time and the required skill set needed to manage your travel effectively, you end up spending more.
Annualised, this figure is presumed to cost businesses billions.
By relying on a corporate travel management company, however, you can increase the agility of your travel strategy while decreasing the overall cost and hours spent managing the travel.
Reduce The Cost of Travel and Optimize Spending
Finding cost-efficient travel options is – contrary to popular belief – a specialized skill that takes time and experience to navigate effectively. The job not only entails finding the cheapest cost but ensuring employees are comfortable with their accommodation and travel arrangements. This requires travel managers to negotiate the best rates on appropriate flights and accommodation and take advantage of existing partnerships.
Without these expertise and partnerships, companies – and by extension employees – often overpay for accommodation, flights, and events, leading to an inflated travel budget.
Streamline Your Corporate Travel Policy
The purpose of a corporate policy is to set out guidelines for the company’s business travel, allowing the company to manage the costs and responsibilities associated with travel.
Employees can then refer to these guidelines regarding their travel arrangements.
However, for the policy to be effective, it needs to rely on data. This data – which travel management companies analyze – reveals the best time to book flights and accommodation. For example, data has revealed that booking travel ten days in advance can result in 200% savings. Therefore, you can include in a corporate policy that employees should book travel ten days in advance. Working alongside a travel management company, you can express your travel policy objectives, and use their expertise to develop a travel policy that has maximum impact on your bottom line.
Improve Time Management
Arranging a business trip is a time – and labour-intensive task. However, by using a travel management company, you eliminate the time spent on managing and filing expense claims. Part of our efforts to reduce the burden of travelling is to negotiate with hotels and guesthouses to bill extras – like meals and laundry – to room accounts, making it unnecessary for travellers to use the company or their personal cards for these expenses. When it comes time to bill these expenses, we will send you one bill. The result is less time spent on reconciling and filing expenses.
Enhance Safety and Manage Risk
Travelling throughout Africa comes with significant uncertainty, something most employees don’t have the expertise to navigate. As a corporate travel management company within Africa, we prioritize the safety and security of our clients and are experts at managing the continent’s changing travel landscape. Besides diligently conducting duty of care, we are also available at a moment’s notice to handle any recent changes or dangers that may occur, developing alternative travel arrangements to keep our clients feeling safe and secure.
Even if you aren’t a frequent business traveller, many of the aforementioned benefits make using a travel management company the savvy choice.
