Key Benefits of Outsourcing Your Travel Management Services

Outsourcing your travel management services can come with many benefits for your business and your business travellers.

In recent years, we have seen an increase in the number of business travellers. According to a recent analysis by Morgan Stanley, the number is likely to rise in the coming years. However, in such a fast-paced business setting, organisations may struggle to make business travel arrangements for their personnel.

With a high number of employees who travel frequently, travel managers must organise flights and lodgings, manage travel budgets, guarantee policy compliance, and do several other tasks. This procedure is arduous, demanding, and time-consuming. As a result, most businesses consider hiring a Travel Management Company (TMC) such as The Travel Group to handle their business travel management.

The Travel Group can assist your business in saving time while also ensuring a streamlined corporate travel management procedure.

The benefits of outsourcing business travel management are numerous, guaranteeing cost-effective and efficient business travel.

5 Key Benefits of Outsourcing Business Travel Management:

1. Seamless Booking Process

Most businesses struggle with the intricacies of the booking process. It might be difficult for travel managers to arrange several flights, hotels, rental cars, and so on for different personnel with varying destinations and itineraries.

Furthermore, customers must spend a significant amount of time searching through several third-party websites to select the best and most cost-effective travel options. Last-minute cancellations or alterations to the business trip itinerary can complicate the process even more.

You don’t have to worry about booking difficulties when you outsource your corporate travel management to a TMC; they’ll handle everything. The TMC books flights, hotels, rental cars, and other travel services that offer the best bargains and discounts. This is due to their partnerships with the industry’s top hotels, flight companies and other service providers.

The TMC arranges travel arrangements based on the number of employees travelling at the same time and accommodates any last-minute modifications to the travel plan or route. They also negotiate with hotel and flight vendors to fulfil your employees’ unique demands and secure the best bargains and discounts.

Moreover, business travellers and those approving travel expenses will receive instant alerts for any bookings that don’t comply with the travel policy.

2. 24/7/365 Business Travel Support

When your employees travel for business, safety is critical. Employees might encounter unforeseen situations such as natural disasters, getting stuck in an airport or city because of a worldwide pandemic, political instability, loss of luggage, and so forth. Furthermore, female travellers suffer higher safety hazards than their male counterparts.

In such cases, travel managers must offer them business travel assistance. However, offering support can be difficult in such cases due to time zone differences, weekends, or after-work hours.

These concerns can be resolved by outsourcing your business travel management. A travel management agency offers round-the-clock travel to help your staff in the event of such crises.

3. Travel Policy Compliance

Travel policy breaches are one of the most typical issues that travel managers and businesses encounter. Employees break travel policies for a variety of reasons. Either the policy is not well conveyed by management, the requirements are too hard to follow, or they are uninformed that a travel policy exists.

Outsourcing your corporate travel management allows you to assure travel policy compliance.

Some TMCs on the market include travel management software, which allows you to create policies based on the type of person and department, travel destination, and other criteria.

This program allows your business travellers to see the travel policies in real-time. This precludes them from making any out-of-policy reservations or charges. Additionally, business travellers and approvers are immediately notified if any out-of-policy bookings are made. This eliminates the need for travel managers to monitor policy infringements.

4. Cost Optimisation

A significant hurdle that businesses and travel managers face is cost optimization for business travel. When employees can’t discover enough airline and hotel options, they tend to book outside of company guidelines.

The usage of TMCs has progressively increased over the last five years for a variety of reasons, to relieve the finance manager of the burden and delegate it to a group that understands and can efficiently do the necessary tasks. It also means that the fundamental monitoring operations are handled by a firm that understands the language and can negotiate the best pricing with the providers.

Another advantage of hiring an outsourced company is that the cost is fixed and does not include additional fees. Because some organisations employ a number of travelling employees, it becomes extremely cost-effective to outsource as one travel agency can cover it all.

5. Business Travel Insights

Most firms require assistance with business travel analytics. To optimise their corporate travel management process, travel managers must analyse travel policy breaches, employee and department spending and expenditures made for each trip.

Corporate travel management outsourcing can help you with this because you will have access to corporate travel data and analytics. The TMC incorporates travel and expense management software, which consolidates all trip information onto a single platform. These dashboards are customisable and allow you easy access to real-time data.