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Around 400 million people in the USA go for long-distance business trips on an annual basis. Corporate travel has become essential for businesses of all sizes, not just the bigger corporations, as it helps them grow.

As the cost of hotels, transportation, and food continues to rise, organizing business trips can be a challenge, especially for small and mid-sized business owners. They have to resort to cutting corners to stay within budget.

In this post, we have discussed a few ways that can help reduce the cost of business travel and give you and your employees greater freedom on your next business trip.

How your company can reduce the cost of Business Travel

Traveling holds tremendous value in the growth of a company. The personal interaction it brings helps form the foundations of future relationships. It allows you to establish and maintain relationships with valued clients. 

Being able to meet in person helps you build your brand more effectively as well as network around. But as the expenditure on traveling continues to rise, so do the prices of everything from hotels to flights and transportation.

Companies need to completely overhaul the way they approach travel to ensure trips on a budget but without the hassle. You need to take a thorough look at existing practices and put resources to use smartly.

Let us take a look at some of the ways you can save money on your business travels.

1. Invest in corporate travel services

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Enlisting the help of a service of some kind is an effective way to outsource the hassle of managing your travels. Having travel agent apps can help you effectively organize aspects such as the documentation of a trip. 

If you are looking for comprehensive travel management that frees you from putting any effort into managing your trips, professional corporate services can be a boon. They take care of everything from booking a trip and managing it in real-time to taking care of its documentation. 

TravelPerk offers corporate travel services that combine technology with human support to simplify traveling. The service doesn't just book trips but provides instant solutions on cancellations and rescheduling. 

Having an organized business travel management can significantly help in reducing travel expenses by streamlining processes and planning ahead of time. A dedicated corporate travel service allows you to do just that. Furthermore, it also helps you stay ahead in compliance. 

2. Update your policies

50% of the companies do not have any policy relating to mobile bookings when it is rapidly becoming the most common way to book trips. This rise in out-of-policy bookings indicates a brewing problem with companies having serious troubles with adhering to their travel policies. 

A travel policy is essential to a company's functioning as it outlines the rules and procedures regarding business travels of every nature. It is the guideline employees look up to understand rules better or in case of crisis for solutions. 

You should strive to simplify your policies for a better understanding. This can be done via the creation of policies from scratch if you don’t have one or by updating the existing ones to simplify them. The goal should be to make them easy to understand and implement.

Having simple policies that can be followed by your team vastly reduces out-of-policy bookings. It gives you a framework to fall back on and bring order to procedures. They help in reducing travel expenses in the long run.

1. Creating or simplifying the policies

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If you don’t have a travel policy, you will need to create one from scratch. If you do have one, conduct a thorough examination of it to see how it can be improved upon. If you wish to have a completely fresh start, you can discard your old policies entirely and start new.

To create an effective travel policy, you need to set clear guidelines for every aspect of a business trip. This includes the modes of payment when booking tickets to allowances for local transportation in the place of visit. 

In general, here is what should be included in your travel policy:

• Mode of transport for both getting to the place of a visit to local transportation within the area.

• Hotel accommodations and what they entail.

• Mode of payment for all spending.

• Recording the receipts of every expense.

• Limit on-site spending. This can include phone calls being made there or any entertainment activities you indulge in.

Make sure you lay out the budget and code of conduct for your employees to follow on the trips. However, they can be subjective to the trip itself. Lastly, you may also lay out any ideal options for employees to follow, such as using credit cards over other methods.

2. Communicating the policy changes to the employees

One of the things companies often forget about when it comes to travel policies is to communicate them to the employees. The policies are made for employees, they need to be communicated to them with easy-to-understand terms so that they can enforce them.

All the policy documents should be available to your workforce via the internal network or the travel management platform you use. Any updates in the policy also need to be notified to the employees.

Policies often go unread because they are cumbersome with legal argon average employees cannot understand. Holding seminars that explain the policy content in full will be greatly helpful in familiarizing employees with the rules and regulations.

Additionally, you may entertain questions and feedback from your teams. This ensures that they truly understand their duties and responsibilities. Such practices vastly reduce the chances of out-of-policy bookings and general missteps from your team.

3. Set the trip approval process straight

The process of planning and approving a trip is crucial. It holds the key to making a business trip effortless, smooth, and hassle-free. Begin by crafting a simple but definitive process to get a trip approved.

Employees should be required to input all the necessary details such as mode of transportation, the duration, and place of stay, as well as an approximate budget for onsite spending. This ensures that no one exploits the system. 

That said, the pre-planning should also leave room for improvising. There should always be provisions for unexpected events happening. The knowledge that the company supports them in unexpected events makes your team more loyal to you.

Conversely, you don’t want to make the approval process too easy as well. Keep it moderate and substance oriented. A trip needs to have relevant reasons to happen and should only be as long as needed. 

4. Plan ahead

The importance of planning anything cannot be overstated. For example, booking a flight in advance can help you save around 61% on economy airfare. Many booking portals offer deals and discounts on early bookings and charge higher for urgent bookings.

As a rule of thumb, avoid any last minute travels unless they are truly necessary. And if you have to indulge in one, limit the number of people that go on them. Staying ahead on schedule also helps you estimate an appropriate budget.

You can also research thoroughly about the place beforehand to extract more value from your visit. Planning trips in advance helps you prioritize things better. It helps you save both money and time while making the overall experience smooth and hassle-free.

5. Log and monitor expenses correctly

When you book a flight, the basic ticket price remains the same more or less, it’s the additional expenses such as luggage fees, seat upgrades, and meals during the flight that truly add to the total bill. Additional expenses inflate your budget without you even realizing it.

To combat this issue, you need to log and monitor your expenses systematically. There are many budgeting tools available that can help you track your expenses to help identify the unnecessary ones that need to be cut out.

Once you log expenses, you become aware of how much you are spending. Logging them correctly is vital to monitoring them. This is why you need to make sure your employees don’t miss out on logging any expenses. It is vital to the next step.

For monitoring, you need to look to analyze the routine log-ins during trips to identify the superfluous expenses. Curb of them to see of the trip is affected in any significant way. Furthermore, reward employees that stay within the budget. It will motivate others to follow suit.

Conclusion

The role of business travel in growing a business by the way of networking is crucial. It allows you to form connections with your clients and gain their trust. However, the rising cost of traveling today can often be challenging for firms.

Efficiently managing your travels can greatly help in reducing the cost of business travel in the long run. You can enlist the help of corporate travel services or plan in advance to save on your business trips without hassle.

Let us know in the comments what are your tricks to reduce the cost of business travel.

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