Three Ideal Ways to Cut Back Business Travel Expenses

With cloud technology providing greater visibility into how and where travelers spend, companies have a better chance of negotiating contracts. And, with policies being incorporated into expense solutions and travel booking tools, much of the compliance can be achieved, thus allowing program managers to focus on strategic objectives.

Unnecessary travel is one key area for managers to examine. With expense management software, it is easy to make changes for travel spending based on business conditions. The idea is to analyze data and determine why employees are traveling and figure out areas that could be cut. Then, a booking tool can be used to execute new policies to prevent unnecessary spending. In addition, following some quick tips can help minimize travel costs.

Non-revenue Travel Meet-ups

Probably, non-revenue generating travel is the first area to cut. Regular meet ups such as attending conferences, recruiting events and training sessions do not generate any revenue. Also, internal meetings are the clearest non-revenue generating meet-ups. Setting up an extra layer of approval will work well for these kind of meetings.

Travel Class Adjustments

Letting your employees know what class they can fly and what tier of hotel they can stay in can help cut unnecessary costs. For instance, for revenue generating trip, you can fly in premium economy class. And, for internal meeting discussion may be you have to choose moderate hotel and flying economy.

A travel booking tool can help you implement the rules so that you can tie available hotels and cabin classes to meeting type. This can be one way to avoid unnecessary travel expenses.

Aggregate meetings

Grouping non-revenue generating trips and revenue generating trips can work well to compress various meetings into one trip, so as to avoid flying into the same location multiple times. It is difficult for technology to know about upcoming trips. Therefore, the policy is communicated through email and emphasized in a booking tool. When a user selects a non-revenue generating trip, an alert will be displayed asking “do you have any trips planned at the same location?” This way you can avoid unnecessary meet-ups.