Your business can make business trips successful only by improving employees’ work travel experiences and helping them overcome business travel risks. At the same time, you have to focus on controlling the average business trip cost to increase the number of business trips.
A travel management company will help your employees accomplish business travel goals without increasing the average cost of the business trip. While outsourcing a complex business process like corporate travel management, you have the option to choose from several travel management companies.
Each company helps you streamline corporate travel management by providing services and tech solutions. But some companies stand out from competitors by providing superior travel management services and leveraging cutting-edge technologies.
Your company or startup should focus on partnering with one of the leading travel management companies. But you must use some important parameters or criteria to choose the travel management company for your business.
9 Criteria to Choose the Right Travel Management Company for Your Business
1. Policy Compliance
Your organization can define reimbursable and non-reimbursable travel expenses by defining travel policies. But you cannot control average business trip costs without preventing policy violations. Self-booking options provided to employees often increase instances of policy violation.
The TMC will help you prevent travel policy violations by showing and recommending only in-policy travel products to employees. But you must evaluate the strategies and techniques used by the company to ensure 100% policy compliance.
2. Travel Choices and Booking Options
Many employees these days passionately believe in reducing carbon footprints during business trips. They make business travel sustainable by booking eco-friendly flights and environment-friendly accommodations.
But many work travelers still prefer conventional business travel products to stay safe and stress-free. Hence, you should partner with a TMC that enables your employees to access extensive travel inventories consisting of conventional and sustainable travel products.
At the same time, you need to ensure that the TMC personalized travel booking experiences according to the booking history and travel choices of individual employees. You can even opt for companies that encourage your employees to prioritize sustainable travel products over conventional travel products.
3. Cost Control
You can centralize business travel bookings by working with a TMC. Most TMCs help your organization control the average business trip costs by facilitating negotiated and corporate rates. They enable your employees to book travel products at lower than market rates.
But you can reduce the average business trip cost significantly when the TMC books fully-flexible tickets. Your employees can cancel and reschedule these tickets without paying fees or penalties. The flexibility is essential to enable employees to make last-minute booking changes without increasing business travel costs.
4. Duty of Care
Your business needs duty of care resources to keep employees safe, comfortable, and safe when they travel for work. In addition to meeting legal and moral obligations, the duty of care resources will help employees overcome various business travel risks.
Your employees need both information and support to remain safe and stress-free. For instance, they need up-to-date information to overcome risks like flight cancellations and flight delays. Likewise, they need real-time support to manage emergencies.
You should use a TMC that helps employees overcome common minor business travel risks by delivering real-time information. At the same time, the TMC must help employees manage emergencies by providing real-time support.
Many TMCs these days provide comprehensive duty-of-care solutions to clients by partnering with international health and security risk management companies. You should choose a TMC that enables employees to access duty-of-care solutions across destinations.
5. Expense Reporting
Your business cannot track and control costs without streamlining a crucial step in corporate travel management – travel expense management. In addition to accelerating travel expense reimbursements, you need to track, review, and analyze travel expenses incurred by employees.
A TMC will help you streamline the crucial process by submitting consolidated travel expense reports. But you can track and review travel expenses efficiently only when the reports provide detailed information.
The elaborate information will help you track travel spending in real-time and find opportunities to curtail unproductive travel expenses. Hence, you should prioritize TMCs that provide robust expense management solutions to your finance team.
6. Tech Solutions
Leading TMCs streamlines corporate travel management by providing tech solutions. Some companies provide travel booking solutions to employees, while others provide expense management solutions to the finance team.
But you should prioritize a TMC that facilitates end-to-end automation by providing unified travel and expense management software. In addition to automating the multistep process fully, the software will help you make informed decisions by leveraging real-time travel and expense data.
7. Customer Service
Your employees will contact the TMC’s customer support team to access relevant information and avail of real-time assistance. Hence, you can boost employees’ business travel experience and safety only by partnering with a company that provides superior customer support.
You must ensure that TMC offers 24/7 customer support through widely used channels like telephone, instant messaging, and emails. At the same time, you should evaluate the customer support provided by the company using important parameters like average response time and cost of support.
8. Experience and Expertise
Most TMCs these days provide travel management services and solutions to enterprises in various sectors. But travel management needs vary across organizations and industries. Hence, you should shortlist companies that have experience in managing business travel programs of companies from your industry. Also, you should check if the company customizes travel management services according to the precise needs of individual clients.
9. Reputation
In addition to considering its experience and expertise, you should evaluate TMC’s reputation. It is always advisable to assess the company’s reputation by reading the reviews and testimonials of existing customers. Also, you can gather relevant information about the company from verified review sites. However, you must not forget to ask relevant questions to the TMC while assessing its reputation based on online information.
Final Word
The right travel management company will manage your short-term and long-term business travel needs efficiently. But you should prioritize companies that enable your organization to work with travel experts and leverage cutting-edge technologies simultaneously. The combination of human intelligence and artificial intelligence will help your organization increase the ROI of business travel consistently.
