According to GBTA, business travel spend is the second largest cost nominal in an organization, after manpower. A little tweak here and there can save millions of dollars for a business, which is so vital in an atmosphere of intense competition. Achieving goals can be easy, provided you start the right way. A proper business travel platform would be the first step. Most often corporates are seen rushing to use consumer websites (meant for leisure bookings), or to the friendly neighborhood, agents to fulfill their travel requirements.
Here are some quick tips to achieving your goals, although the actual list is pretty long.
Book “Flexi-fares”
A corporate traveler is always subjected to exigencies. Flights may change, travel restrictions may vary, and trips may be affected relatively quickly. When you sign-up for a travel-tech platform, ensure that it offers flexible fares – where you can change or cancel any aspect of your trip, at any time, at no cost. This provides peace of mind and also saves those precious dollars. IncBuddy supports access to Flexi-fares that can make a difference almost instantly.
A corporate traveler is always subjected to exigencies. Flights may change, travel restrictions may vary, and trips may be affected relatively quickly. When you sign-up for a travel-tech platform, ensure that it offers flexible fares – where you can change or cancel any aspect of your trip, at any time, at no cost. This provides peace of mind and also saves those precious dollars. IncBuddy supports access to Flexi-fares that can make a difference almost instantly.
Be watchful of your spending
The technology should support easy tracking, through amazing slice-n-dice dashboards, which can in real-time track spending, and provide recommendations on what can be tweaked in the policy to stay within budget.
Cancelations can wreak havoc
On average, there are about 10% cancelations, given the nature of corporate bookings and cancellations which happen at the last minute. Cancellations means, the airline loses the opportunity to sell the seat and therefore, in most cases, will not refund the money. Dealing with cancelations and the consequent losses is one of the key pain points when it comes to travel management.
IncBuddy provides “Flexi-fares” that help you to not lose money when you cancel. You can easily adjust your policy setting such that each employee or the travel manager only books flexible rates. Such “Flexi-fares” come with many other advantages which will be discussed in another article.
Encourage travelers to return to cost-effective hotels
Hotels can be mighty expensive if you have not set a policy with the area, type, budget you have. A corporate may scout around for a good rate from a hotel or two but decreases its scope of a wider inventory and choice of a better hotel for cheaper.
IncBuddy has negotiated rates with several hotels, owing to the amount of business given to the hotels. Its got several hotel suppliers on its platform with more than 1M+ properties. You will get better discounts on the platform than you would if you book from the hotel portal or scout around. You can also set your preferences of hotel type, and other amenities in your policy and CRM, so that you are always getting the best accommodation at all times, automatically presented and booked to you at the best rates. Also setting up a “free cancelation” mandate in your policy will help save a lot of money.
Centralization of all bookings
Asking all employees to book in one place will save the corporate a lot of money. This will make all travel matters reside in one place and easier to monitor and control your employee’s travel behavior, ensuring he/she is not booking out of policy (the system will flag this). This also makes the workflow smarter, and save on redundant actions.
Budget Allocation:
Allocating a travel budget to a cost center or a department, means you have already pre-empted any cost overflow. In IncBuddy, budget limits can be set and trip approvers, as well as the finance manager, are able to see the usage and the remaining budget to help make an informed decision for future bookings.
Convenience fees:
Almost all consumer portals, charge convenience fees, which is not evident when you are browsing the fares but gets added in the final total when you are about to pay. So please be aware. IncBuddy is 100% free in DIY mode.
In case, you are exploring platforms, or want to try out our system, please reach out to us for a free trial at https://incbuddy.app/enquiry/ or write to us at support@incbuddy.app