Why trust what we say?
We have booked 75,000+ trips for our customers from 1,000+ companies. We specialize in flight routing, airline/hotel pricing, credit cards, loyalty benefits and providing localized 24/7 support across the globe. We have a track record of delivering genuine savings to customers from 188 countries.
Intro
Why companies still travel?
Companies still travel for many reasons such as conferences, implementation projects, candidate interviews and sales meetings. Speaking with someone face-to-face is more intimate and can lead to stronger connections and increased business.
Whether the increased business covers the cost of travel (compared to video conferencing) depends on many variables, but most companies still swear by in-person meetings.
Why managing team travel isn’t easy
Booking travel for yourself online at retail prices is relatively easy; the difficult part is managing travel for a team, especially a team that needs to be productive.
Here are some examples of issues:
Credit Card Authorizations
- If your company books travel on a company credit card, someone needs to handle the credit card authorization forms for all hotels and even some airlines. These need to be faxed (yes, faxed). Without these forms, airlines can deny boarding and hotels may require re-payment. Managing these forms and making sure they’re all received is a nightmare.
Cost vs. Convenience
- The most convenient itineraries typically cost 2-5 times the cheapest itineraries. If your company has no controls in place, travelers will book the most costly options. When you try to implement controls, you will need to designate someone as “bad cop” to reject exception requests. As you grow, this will become a job no one wants.
Emergencies
- People miss flights all the time. Have you ever tried to re-book a non-refundable international flight at the airport? It can cost thousands and take hours to resolve. What about a group of 20 who miss a flight and have all of their subsequent flights cancelled with no refund. It takes a ton of work to avoid spending $1000s to fix these issues.
Managing Travel
Insourcing vs. Outsourcing
Not everyone should outsource their travel bookings and management. If you’re a small team that doesn’t travel much, you can handle it internally.
There are two ways to manage travel internally:
- Distributed (everyone books themselves), or
- Centralized (a single person books for everyone else)
The main benefit of the centralized style is a single person can hone their skills and save the company a small fortune.
However, you should only centralize travel management if you have someone dedicated to operations. If you choose an engineer, you’ll hinder their core work. Even one trip a week is enough to lose one day a week when things go wrong.
Tip: Only centralize travel management to operations staff.
When insourcing your travel becomes too much, rather than hire a travel manager internally, it makes more sense to outsource. An outsourced team has more resources and experience. Most also have a global presence and provide 24/7 support.
A few cautionary points about outsourcing your travel:
- It costs money, even if advertised as free
- It may not work as well in the beginning
- It could lead to spending even more
Let’s say you’ve taken a ton of United flights this year and you’re close to reaching 1K elite status, but you predict you won’t quite reach it by the end of the year. You can construct an itinerary that earns those additional miles for the lowest price possible so you qualify. This is called a mileage run.
A mileage run involves flying a flight itinerary purely for the purpose of earning miles. This can be for redeemable miles or elite status miles.
Contributors
Melissa Sands
