How Mobile Apps are Reshaping Business Travel Experience

Smartphones and tablets have become an essential part of our everyday life. Whether we are at the workplace or home, mobile devices hold the key to a smoother, simpler, and more connected experience. The right mobile apps help organizations stay one step ahead and keep the workforce engaged and empowered.

Business travel apps have become popular as most travelers prefer to book flights via mobile apps rather than online travel portals. These apps influence how they research, book, and experience destinations, and they help to quickly navigate problems during a trip. Mobile apps have completely disrupted the industry. Employees now expect a lightning-speed mobile experience that allows them to enjoy every trip while eliminating issues that might occur along the way.

Easy Pre-trip Process

Frequent travelers would be happy if they could create a travel request for their next trip while still on their current trip. With a mobile app, employees can create travel requests and send them to their managers for approval while they are on the road. Once the trip is approved, business travelers can book flights, hotels, etc., using authorized travel booking tools. Also, they can continuously watch their flight status and get directions to their hotels.

Better Travel Compliance Management

Your corporate travel policy offers significant support for your travel. It states how your employees travel, where they stay, and which expenses are acceptable and which are not. When you adopt a T&E management mobile app, your company’s travel policy becomes an essential part of the spend management process.

You can customize the system based on your organization’s travel policy, which sets limits and reduces the possibility of overspending or expense fraud. Your employees will be notified if expenditure exceeds the approved amount for a category, or if they need to submit a receipt for an expense. You can utilize the mobile app to show employees the prefer airlines and hotels to book from.

Submit Expenses on the Go

Employees do not need to wait until they get back to their hotel or desk to record their expenditures. With a mobile app, they can simply take a picture of the receipt using their smartphone – it will capture the essential details, like merchant, date, and amount, and record a related expense entry.

These receipts are stored electronically for report generation and future reference so your travelers will no longer have to worry about losing receipts. Mobile applications also offer offline spend reporting, where employees can add their receipts to the app and sync them once they are connected to the internet. Overall, recording expenses using the mobile app boosts the expense reporting process.

Efficient Mileage Tracking

Employees often exaggerate their mileage expenses; it is one of the most common expense frauds. Identifying and controlling mileage expense fraud is challenging since you depend only on the data provided by your employees. Using an automated system can be the best way to track mileage expenses and overcome fraud.

Travel managers can configure default mileage rates for different vehicles. When employees are on the road, they can turn-on the GPS on their smartphone to record point-to-point mileage with the mobile app. Once recorded, the mileage expenses can be added to a spend report. On top of being accurate and reliable, the mileage tracking functionality simplifies spend reporting process for your employees.

High Visibility into Travel Spend

Limited access makes it hard for your employees to record their expenditures. A travel and expense management mobile app simplify this task for your travelers. Instead of searching for receipts kept in their wallets and spending time entering the details manually, your employees can create travel requests, book travel (flight, cab, hotel, etc.) submit spend reports, and track the approval process on the fly.

An online system helps you track employee travel expenses – you can view how much they have spent on each category, or how much they have spent on a specific vendor. This enables you to analyze your employee spending throughout the trip, track excessive spending, and monitor policy violations. You can utilize these insights to plan your budgets for your future trips efficiently.

The introduction of AI into corporate travel management has taken things to the next level. The AI-enabled app offers an automatic, yet personal, experience providing travelers with their travel buddy. The implementation of messenger style chatbots in travel and expense management app means that the employees are switched on, engaged, and empowered. Chatbots offer a better customer service experience by combining all the elements of a trip and providing 24/7 support wherever and whenever a traveler needs it.