African travel has improved over the last two decades. For many, it has become a Utopian destination. However, leisure travel and corporate travel, especially in developing countries, don’t compare. Instead, the continent represents a challenging travel destination because of the uncertainty synonymous with the most resource-rich countries. For those in the mining industry, these challenges can be detrimental to a company’s short and long term strategic objectives, and without effective travel management, can delay key milestones.
What Effective Travel Management does for Mining Employees
There are several reasons why traveling to an African destination may be on the agenda for mining professionals. Expats are a critical part of a productive mining operation and maintain an exhaustive roster, splitting their time between the mining site and their home. Consequently, a core part of our job requires us to manage these intricate itineraries that can include convoluted flight paths out of a remote mining location and require effective travel management, that: prioritizes safety and enhances time management.
Prioritize Safety
Mining carries with it unique risks. Besides being at depths of over 3,000 feet, another set of risks are imminent for expats who mine in those countries. The more remote the destination or the increased proclivity for fringe activities in a country, the higher the risk to workers who need to travel to those regions. Unfortunately, some of the most resource-rich African countries are also the continent’s riskiest.
COVID-19 has only added complexity that requires maintaining relevant information from local authorities to ensure travellers aren’t blocked from boarding their flight.
Therefore, at Approver Travel, our primary focus is safety. We do this by relying on technology and a growing network of African travel experts to develop the safest routes and itineraries for executives in a manner that does not hinder their objectives.
Enhance Time Management
Even travel to Africa should be efficient. Valuable management hours should go to performing profitable tasks.
However, in the absence of effective travel management, many mining professionals are abandoned after booking a flight and confirming an itinerary.
At Approver Travel, we manage all travel-related activities, including route planning, managing frequent flyer accounts, and providing online after-sales. Doing this enables our clients to focus on their profit-bearing tasks. In this process, we’ve saved our clients over 124 management hours.
What Makes Approver Travel Different
At Approver Travel, we don’t just do corporate travel management, our nucleus is mining travel. By honing in on this industry, we can use our mining-industry experience on developing services that make a difference to mining-related travel. These are just some of the ways we’ve been able to improve mining travel.
24-Hour Access To Our Team
Half-way across the world, family emergencies are challenging to navigate, for these moments, you need appropriate recourse that allows you to be with your family.
Additionally, the risk profiles of some countries like the DRC or Burkina Faso change instantly. You may need a flight out or a change in your itinerary that realigns with the current warnings. For mining professionals, who present the most at-risk group, waiting for the office hours of an agency to make changes is not feasible.
Since we understand the gravity of both family emergencies and political unrest, our team is available 24/7 to respond to queries and make changes or develop strategies for challenging travel incidents.
Accurate and Streamlined Reporting
Reporting is critical to future and current travel plans. Our reporting tool focuses on data, enabling us to identify gaps in a company’s travel management, isolate these gaps, and provide cost-saving solutions.
Additionally, we use these reports to determine frequent travel destinations, allowing us to negotiate with carriers to create contracted fares.
World-Class Crisis Management
When a team of executives or a single executive needs to travel to your Burkina Faso mine, given its recent history of mining executive kidnappings and ongoing conflicts in the country, having real-time access to their travel manager is essential. Not only does it increase safety, but it also gives employees peace of mind that when travelling to remote destinations, they are safe.
At Approver Travel, our travel experts – Michelle, Andrea, and Galatia – are available to answer calls and texts round-the-clock through our direct line. Our clients don’t need to navigate robotic call centre agents before dealing with their contact person.
This makes incidents or potential incidents easy to report, and we can use the information we gather to share warnings about a region with other clients.
If you’re travelling to an African mining destination, consider using our services. We’re the preferred travel management agency for many mining companies and executives. Through our expertise, we’ve managed to make corporate travel to Africa less daunting than ever before.
You can reach our team at +27 (0) 82 510 1768 or email bookings@approvertravel.com. We’re always available.
