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Corporate travel management: What is it?

What is corporate travel management?

5 min
Posted: 01 July 2020
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No matter what industry you’re in, every aspect of your business requires planning, organising and analysis. One of these aspects is business travel—and that involves a lot more than booking. From logistics and travel spend to tracking your travellers and monitoring travel expenses, a lot goes into creating a successful corporate travel programme.

The advantages of having a managed business travel programme are extensive. Beyond tracking and managing your travel spend, a well-executed programme also helps you ensure your business travellers are safe, provides them with personalised travel options, and empowers travelers to book and update their travel at their desk or on the go in the mobile app. A managed programme should also give you the technology that you need to gain in-depth data insights, so you can optimise your programme to increase compliance, find new savings opportunities, save time and more.

What are the benefits of a managed business travel programme?

Travel programmes are beneficial to businesses of all sizes. A growing business needs a travel management company (TMC) that will support its corporate travel programme so that it can scale and evolve. A global organisation needs a business travel management solution that can be tailored for each region where they conduct business so that local requirements and travel options are centralised and easy to find. This also means that each area can be measured for compliance, costs, spending caps and more.

At Egencia, we help corporate travel managers in a number of ways, including:

  • Providing tools to create a travel policy that meets the business’ ROI goals by monitoring and forecasting its travel spend. A well-crafted policy also helps you to increase compliance—and when compliance goes up, costs go down.
  • Savings opportunities at 35,000 hotels with Egencia Preferred rates. Last-minute mobile-only deals that can give you savings of up to 70 per cent, and access to an extensive travel inventory to help you to find the options that fit your travel budget.
  • Optimisation reporting from Egencia Analytics Studio to help you to find more savings. The benchmarking dashboard lets you measure your spend against other, similarly sized businesses and use this data to negotiate better hotel and flight rates.
  • Data visualisation dashboards make it easy to pull reports on your most travelled routes by individuals or groups, find your CO2 footprint and understand the effect of global travel situations like COVID-19.

Need help building a travel policy? Use our free guide.

How do travel management software and technology help?

When it comes to managing travel, technology matters. This holds true as much in the workplace today as it does in your personal life. Booking business trips should be as frictionless as booking a holiday. We understand this—Egencia was the original innovator in digital corporate travel. We built and own the technology that we use for business travel management, which allows us to innovate quickly and deliver a complete and seamless end-to-end travel experience that delights both travellers and travel managers.

Egencia meets all your travel needs to help you create and manage a successful corporate travel programme. Easily manage traveller profiles, payment options and travel policies, or use risk management tools such as Egencia Traveller Tracker to help you to locate business travellers in the case of an emergency. With everything in one place, it also makes approving and travel booking processes simple — there’s no need for multiple online booking tools or complicated approvals. And you can make booking, company policy updates and approvals from wherever you are, across any device.

Travellers on the road will get alerts in real-time if anything that could disrupt their travel happens. If they need help, they can use Egencia AssistMe and get a call back within a few minutes. Our expert travel consultants use the same tools as travellers and arrangers, so they can view every traveller’s complete itinerary to resolve any issues and get them back on the road as quickly as possible. These experts provide round-the-clock support every day of the year, both online and offline.

What role does travel data play?

An abundance of business travel data fuels our technology; machine learning uses what we know about corporate travel policies, booking histories, property preferences, travel industry benchmarks and a host of other information to create compelling, relevant travel choices. Travellers can find in-policy options at the top of their search results, making policy compliance easy, encouraging traveller satisfaction and keeping travel costs under control.

Egencia can provide the same choices and prices that your travellers would get on Hotels.com, alongside specifically negotiated corporate rates. Egencia Preferred rates offer your travellers flights that are better value and hotel stays with exclusive rates that aren’t available to other TMCs and include amenities like flexible cancellations, breakfast and Wi-Fi.

Corporate travel management from Egencia

Travel management services should help you to gain efficiency in your travel programme, save time and money, take care of your travellers and get round-the-clock customer support, and provide you with actionable data.

At Egencia, we’re always here for our customers, from onboarding to helping them to navigate travel disruptions. Find out how corporate travel expertise from Egencia can help you to have a successful travel programme.

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