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Business travel is often necessary when your company needs to meet with customers or partners in a different city, or when they need to go on essential training to better perform in their roles. It can be a costly business expense, however, and with businesses looking to cut expenses wherever they can, travel is sure to be on the list of expenses to cut down. Here are a few ways to save money on business travel.
Change Your Approval Process
The entire end to end process of travelling for business is an expensive one. Your airfare, hotel booking, meal and travel allowances, and other expenses that come along with it, can quickly add up. The simplest way to save money on business travel is naturally not to travel. This is particularly the case with more and more companies investing in IT infrastructure that lends to remote meetings. Changing your approval process and tightening the reigns of when travel is allowed and what expenses are allowed when your employees are travelling is the quickest way to minimize travel expenses.
Buy Cheaper Tickets
Naturally, one of the biggest expenses in your business travel is going to be the airline tickets. While it’s just one of many different expenses when one of your employees heads out of town for a meeting or to make a sales pitch, structuring your airline bookings cleverly can warrant some good savings. This doesn’t always mean opting for economy seats instead of business class but making other changes too, like not booking flexible tickets if you don’t need to and trying to stick to cheaper travel days and times.
Change Your Accommodation Policies
Everyone loves a good five-star hotel experience but when we’re travelling for business, we often don’t actually have the time to enjoy most of the amenities provided. Couple this with the way hotels change their pricing based on demand and getting good value accommodation can be akin to the spin of a roulette wheel. A good start is to simply implement budget limits or star limits to your hotel bookings. Stop paying for the mini-bar charges too, and have those costs come from the S&T allowance. It should also be clear what your company’s policies are when it comes to Downtown Restaurant reservations especially if you will be meeting clients at lunch or dinner.
Use a Service Provider
Service providers that can manage your corporate travel booking are going to be very familiar with the business travel industry and where money can be saved. They might also have access to preferential rates at partner hotels and airlines, further reducing expenses when your employees are required to travel for work. It also allows you to have a central point of reporting and expense management to track just how much travel is costing the company.
Cutting expenses ultimately means bigger profit margins if you can accomplish the same result for less, and travel is absolutely one of these areas. The next time one of your employees needs to travel for business, it will hopefully be with a few new protocols in place to better use the travel budget assigned to them.
