Basics of Corporate Travel Management

The pervasive globalization has made travelling an important staple of corporate operations. This travelling niche has various stakeholders, and a travel agency is one of them. Enterprises usually rely on a competent travel agency to take care of their corporate travel logistics and arrangements.

If you spearhead a travel agency that is still exploring the travel and tour landscape, you must consider offering corporate travel and management. The first and foremost reason to tap into the corporate travel market is its lucrative nature. A travel agency can make more than its current gross revenue by acquiring a couple of corporate travel clients.

Moreover, offering corporate travel management improves the outlook of a travel company in every target market. The handling of corporate travel by an operator implies superior operational capacity and exhibits better professionalism than its peers. This positive projection subsequently allows a travel agency to offers its services at better margins.

However, a travel and tour agency has to overcome various challenges and adopt many stringent practices to benefit from the profitability of corporate travel management. If you are interested in extending your operations to corporate travel management, continue reading this post.

Here, we will shed light on some basics of corporate travel management.

Since corporate travel management is a vast subject, we will focus only on the relevant role of a travel agency.

5 Things that a Travel Agency Needs to Offer

If you want to appear as an eligible corporate travel partner to an enterprise, these five things must be part of your value proposition.

1. A Smart Booking Tool

A travel agency offering a smart booking tool in its corporate travel management can easily win the bid among all the contending agencies. Companies love to partner with travel agencies that can offer them a custom-built booking tool.

Make sure that you offer a maximum number of features in the booking tool so that it can be used as a one-window solution for organizations and their employees. They must be able to plan and book every part of their travelling from that booking app or tool. The tool should also boast a user-friendly and lightweight interface so that clients can easily use it on the go.

A firm that develops travelling technologies can help you get that smart booking tool for your corporate clients.

2. 24/7 Travel Support

Corporate travel involves international destinations and varying time zones. A travel agency handling all of that has to offer 24/7 travel support. For small travel agencies, virtual chatbots are a feasible way to offer such nonstop support. However, most corporate clients may not approve of it. This means you have to have an actual human representative on the support desk.

It is worth mentioning that only assigning a real human for 24/7 support won't cut it. You also need to guarantee that your travel support representatives are promptly escalating the serious issues and getting back to clients with proper follow-ups and follow-throughs.

3. Robust Travel Spend Tracking

Maintaining accessibility and transparency of your travel services is very important to keep the corporate travels satisfied. For that, you need to make it possible that administrative and finance team members of your corporate clients can easily access all the relevant details to track itineraries for their expenditure. Make sure that those spend details are shown according to the tags, labels, and cost centres assigned by the clients.

4. Consolidated Invoicing

If you ought to manage an organization's full corporate travel, you must offer the convenience of consolidated invoicing to your clients. Your client company's accounts department won't appreciate getting an entire pile of invoices for all the individual trips and availed services.

Instead, make a consolidated invoice for a month/quarter covering all the costs and breaking them down into categories within a single document.

5. The Variety and Tiered Services

A multinational organization that consists of multiple hierarchies might seek tiered corporate travel privileges. You need to offer your travel services in line with those levels. This is only possible if you can offer variety. For instance, you have to offer all sorts of air travel— from economy class to chartered flights. Similarly, everything should be part of your accommodation plan, from budget hotel rooms to premium and exclusive resorts.

Offering this variety and tiered services enable an organization to fulfil its companywide corporate travel requirements from a single agency.

Challenges of Corporate Travel Management

As mentioned earlier, offering corporate travel management is no mean feat and tagged with various challenges. Here, we are outlining some of the challenges that you need to be mindful of.

Lack of Communication

A travel agency must establish strong communication with CFOs or any other point of contact in the client companies. The lack of communication can lead to misunderstandings and confusion that might turn the relationship between the agency and client sour. Therefore, besides offering first-rate travelling services, an agency must also focus on communication if it wants to extend its contract with corporate clients.

Unnecessary Back and Forth

Working as a third-party travel partner involves a lot of back and forth between you and the individuals you are serving at the corporate end. All that confirmation and approval business throughout the trip isn't just exhaustive for your team but is also frustrating for the travellers. You can cut down all this unwanted and avoidable correspondence by leveraging travelling automation.

Automated confirmations and approvals will reduce your work in half and also save travellers from the hassle and pain of waiting for manual authorizations.

Work Overload

A travel agency managing corporate travel without strong digital infrastructure will burn out very soon. You need to work with a resourceful travel management system and other related technologies to make sure that your team doesn't experience corporate travel management overload.

TravnetTech can help you with all the critical digital resources required for offering corporate travel management services to multinationals. We can also help your travel agency in setting up the digital front and back office of your enterprise.