Nov 15, 2023
Having a Corporate Travel Planner as part of your company makes business travel much smoother. Whether you hire an in-house corporate travel planner, turn to an agency, or use a combination, your company’s business travellers will see the benefits.
This article will give you all you need to develop a solid business travel plan for every trip.
Corporate Travel Managers have the job of planning business travel that’s reliable, efficient, and cost-effective.
In terms of making the trip possible, they need to:
The best business trip planners always remember to make necessary arrangements around ground travel. One way to do this is by allowing travellers to self-book work rides and charge them to your company in the Bolt app — make this possible by signing up with Bolt Business.
But there’s far more to corporate travel planning than making bookings:
79% of business travellers state that business travel impacts their job satisfaction. To give them the best possible experience, you need a Corporate Travel Planner with these qualities.
An experienced travel planner knows everything that could happen during a business trip. Their attention to detail will ensure that travellers encounter as few problems as possible.
Good practices for business travel planning include:
Corporate Travel Planners need excellent organisational skills to ensure that every business trip goes to plan. Depending on the number of business travellers within your company, they’ll plan several trips simultaneously.
The most organised individuals in the industry will go the extra mile by planning a productive and enjoyable itinerary and even giving travellers a business travel checklist.
Making business trips cost-effective is one of the most important aspects for companies. When you work with a Corporate Travel Planner with excellent negotiation skills, they’ll get the best flight, accommodation, and insurance rates.
To plan multiple business trips simultaneously, Corporate Travel Managers must master time management. Even last-minute business trips are handled with expertise by the best professionals.
Business travellers can run into an issue at any time during their trip. Whether it’s an issue with travel documents, a hotel booking, or onward travel, your Business Travel Planner must be ready to find a solution.
Every business traveller has their individual preferences. Whether travellers prefer an aisle seat, enjoy active travel, or like to travel early, a Corporate Travel Planner will remember each person’s desires.
Planning and managing business trips gives your company a wealth of data that can make future business trips more cost-effective and time-efficient. Corporate Travel Managers should be able to look into the numbers and propose areas of improvement.
Travelling to a new international destination holds great potential but also means facing many unknowns. A Corporate Travel Planner will help to ease any concerns by researching:
Hiring a Corporate Travel Manager to manage business travel for your company keeps all business trip planning in-house. They’ll take responsibility for booking travel and accommodation, looking for cost-saving opportunities, and managing the company’s travel policy.
Turning to an agency is the alternative to hiring an in-house Corporate Travel Planner — allowing you to outsource all aspects of business travel planning.
Whether you hire someone in-house or turn to an agency, various tools are needed to manage corporate travel.
Being a business travel organiser means making arrangements for all areas of a business trip, and it’s important to remember ground travel. Bolt Business gives your team a comfortable, convenient, and flexible way to arrange travel to and from the office, airport, or client meetings.
A tool such as Tripit gives you and your business travellers a convenient way of following an itinerary keeps travel documents in one place, and gives visibility of carbon emissions.
After a business trip, you want your travellers to return to their day-to-day work. But they can’t do that when manually filling out expense reports. Expense management tools help with this.
Leading examples include:
These allow travellers to take photos of receipts, which become a digital expense report, speeding up the process of claiming expenses.
Regarding ground travel, when your company has a Bolt Business account, your employees see your company as a payment method in their Bolt app — removing the need for expenses altogether!
Hotels aren’t the only option for business travellers. And a growing number of business travellers are looking for alternative accommodation to hotels, such as hosted accommodation and homestays — especially amongst female employees.
Services such as Airbnb for Work give your travellers diverse options when looking for somewhere to stay.
A business itinerary includes all the information a business traveller needs during the trip. By breaking the trip into different parts and use the business travel plan template below as a guide:
With Bolt Business, you can easily make airport transfers using the same app in 45+ countries.
With flights and accommodation booked, you still need to connect the dots — and ground travel is the answer.
Rather than leaving business travellers unsure about how they’ll get from the airport to their next destination, add a work payment method to their Bolt app by signing up with Bolt Business.
Corporate travel planners have complete control over who can travel, when they can travel, and how much they can spend from a Company Dashboard. Then your travellers will see your company as a payment method in their Bolt app.
They can book work rides as and when needed or schedule rides up to 3 days in advance.
A travel planner works to give clients the best possible travel experience by arranging flights, accommodation, and all other essential travel.
Corporate travel management is an umbrella term for all aspects of a business trip, such as arranging flights, accommodation, and ground travel.
Companies have three main options for corporate travel management: hiring an in-house travel planner, using a travel agency, or turning to booking tools. Many companies use a combination of all three.
Create a Bolt Business account for your company online today.
