How to Set Up Business Travel Policies in Your Company?

In the last decade, the corporate travel industry has grown exponentially to cater to growing numbers of travelling executives. Owing to this, organisations around the world have realised the importance of corporate travel planning and are paying more attention to this department. And why shouldn't they? Business travel makes an impact and has helped companies grow at a faster pace.

With a growing demand for business travel, it has become necessary for companies to have a business travel policy in place. The major significance of this move is that a well-defined policy can reduce the burden on the current system and streamline bookings, payments, and reimbursements. From the company's point of view, a business travel policy can help implement cost control without the need for an additional task force to handle corporate travel.

Understanding the need for an efficient travel policy and creating one that works are two different things. All organisations must understand the dynamics of business travel and travel management tools for creating a transparent travel policy. As many companies are new to the concept, this blog helps in understanding the basics of policy creation and talks about ways in which you can set it up.

Know Your Objective

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Whether big or small, every organisation must understand the difference between need and want. A compact, easy-to-understand business travel policy must reflect the company's objectives when it comes to corporate travel.

The policy should be accommodating and flexible without compromising on monthly and annual budget targets. It should always have some room for improvement so that it can be easily modified whenever the need arises. For instance, for frequent business travellers, it might be better to break the long journey by adding a layover and offering appropriate hotel options. On the other hand, booking a direct flight to save time spent on actual travelling might be the cup of tea of other business travellers. Thus, if the policy allows for flexibility in terms of booking options/budget (within a reasonable boundary), the result will be happier employees.

Here are some of the key points to keep in mind while identifying the objectives of the policy:

Cost-effective travel

Smooth expense management

Safe travel experience

Easy travel expense reimbursements

Fast grievance handling mechanism

Flexibility to handle unforeseen travel

Easy connectivity options for travellers

Use of simple business travel management tools

Create Simple and Brief Guidelines

When creating a business travel policy, you should ensure that the guidelines are brief and clearly stated to avoid confusion. The explanation should be clear to all the employees of the company regardless of their role in the company. Ambiguity leads to financial losses as employees are able to find loopholes in the policy and incur expenses that could have been avoided.

Include Important Components

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A business travel policy must clearly outline inclusions and exclusions. You can consider several factors before deciding the inclusions. All components included must be necessary and globally applicable. Any component that can go out of control in the future should be avoided at all costs. For example, the inclusion of expense allowance for drinks and meals to entertain clients.

Even if you have to include such components, clearly define the expense limits to keep everyone on the same page. Ambiguity can give rise to confusion and eventually lead to heavy financial losses. Additionally, there are several vital components to consider:

Hotel room types and cost

Incidental spends and the process for reimbursements

Accidental insurance cover for employee safety

Channel partners’ list for easy bookings

Recommendations from frequent travellers for new executives

Tutorials to help employees use business travel management platforms

Strive to Provide Options

Thousands of corporate executives travel long distances to conduct business. Often, they may not find policy compliant options when making bookings. Therefore, flexibility is a key factor to consider when creating a business travel policy. Provisions should be made to provide alternate options for accommodation, flight operators, time and duration, frequency of layovers, leisure activities, etc.

The reason for this is to let employees easily adjust to the fast-paced environment and dynamism of the business travel market. It also helps in paying proper attention to the requirements of your employees. When you create a business travel policy, there are a lot of unforeseen factors that get left out. Thus, you should always incorporate provisions for options.

In addition to this, companies should also have a system in place that lets employees book these alternate options by taking approval from a higher authority other than their direct manager. Thus, having a two-three level approval in place for out-of-policy bookings makes the entire booking process seamless and uncomplicated.

Start a Dialogue with Employees

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When you implement a travel policy, employees are the ones who are directly impacted. Thus, it is imperative to start a dialogue with the employees before formulating the policy. It is essential to understand their travel needs and the incidental costs that might affect budget while traveling.

The frequency and destination of travel are important points that a policymaker cannot decide for every employee individually. Therefore, it is important to create a policy that covers global requirements of travelling business professionals.

Create a Financial Plan

Every organisation has a limited budget to spend on corporate travel annually. To help with travel and finance management, a lot of companies use business travel management tools. These solutions help companies create different corporate travel policies for different departments.

Creating different policies for different departments can help companies in handling and decreasing expenses. They can also use them to set separate budget constraints for each department. The set business travel budget can also vary between top management, middle management, and executive-level employees. The idea should be to try and accommodate the travel needs of all segments without compromising on the budget.

Utilise a Digital Tool to Make Compliance Easier

Lastly, but surely the most relevant in today's scenario, organisations can make use of technology to employ a robust travel management system that provides them with relevant travel information and booking options, and also ensures compliance.

Many business travel management tools and platforms nowadays have improved the way the whole system works. myBiz, powered by MakeMyTrip, is one such digital platform that is fast gaining popularity due to its simple design and feature-loaded platform. With its help, you can upload the company’s travel policy to see compliant hotel options and flights.

In other words, once you upload your business travel policy onto the platform, it will evaluate the guidelines and only suggest those booking options that comply with the policy. This will ease the entire business planning and travel process, simplify approvals, and reduce modifications.

Do you wish to work with a system that ensures compliance and automates the entire booking process?

Sign up with myBiz!