Key Things to Consider When Choosing a Corporate Travel Platform!

One of the biggest challenges that a company's administrator has to overcome is to find the right balance between ensuring adherence to the company policy and providing a seamless booking experience to the employees. Therefore, here are five factors that help in choosing the best-suited platform to manage your company's dynamic travel needs.

Buy Corporate Gift Cards

Comparative Cost Benefits

A key factor that should be compared against online or offline travel agencies is to check if you are receiving cost benefits against volume. When booking with a travel agency, there arises the issue of limited visibility into real-time pricing. This way, you can end up paying more for a flight even if the price drops down by the time you get all the necessary approvals. Therefore, when choosing a travel platform, ensure that it lets you access real-time prices of hotels and flights. More than that, many online travel management companies offer corporate discounts. You can also avail the added benefits like free meals, nominal to zero cancellation or rescheduling charges and much more.

Company Policy Integration

Every company has its own travel policy and budgetary limitations. Integrating these with the travel portal decidedly reduces the time taken during booking and tallying with policy compliances. Thus, look for a travel portal that can add the policy directly to the system for the ease of booking.

On-the-go Support

Many business travellers feel that they experience inadequate support after the booking has been made. When viewing under the lens of how these travellers have to deal with things such as— car rental mix-ups, hotel check-in issues, or delayed flights, it is inevitable that these things become a source of frustration and unnecessary stress for them. Thus, when choosing a platform, always check whether the travel partner is providing end-to-end support for your employees’ concerns.

Assured GST Invoices

With the enforcement of GST Act, collecting GST-compliant invoices to file for tax purposes is necessary. For claiming tax benefits when employees travel for business, the portal you choose must give you GST invoices for your bookings.

A Wide Range of Hotel and Flight Inventory

Hotel stays also become one of the important considerations when choosing a travel management platform. To ensure that your employees find convenient and comfortable hotels, look for platforms that have a wide inventory. This way, they will be able to book hotels nearer to the locations of business purposes.

A wide range also means hotels that come in various price brackets. Finally, also check whether the travel platform offers the service of early check-in and late checkout for corporate professionals.

In case of flights, ensure that the platform integrates information from all airlines. Thus, you will have the assurance of catching timely flights for sudden business travel requirements.

A Multitude of Added Benefits

While many travel platforms may offer a range of features, we are listing a few which we think are essential to your company’s travel requirements.

1. Reporting Analytics: Travel management software provide many ways to use travelling data and create reports for better tracking and management of spending. These reports help in reconciling financial expenditure in real time and for annual reports.
2. Smart Recommendations: Travel management portals should also give you smart recommendations based on your need, whether catching the cheaper flight, or booking the best-priced and highly rated hotels near the location of business purpose.
3. Self-booking Convenience: Employees find it faster to book for themselves. While it gives them the freedom to choose on their own, it also makes the process faster by doing away with a lengthy booking and approval process.

At the end of the day, it is the responsibility of each employee to contribute towards the company’s growth and business sustainability plans. Therefore, have a travel management software which suits the dynamic needs of your company, and adds value and convenience to your employees’ business travels.

Planning to onboard a business travel management platform?

Sign Up with myBiz!