No matter what industry you’re in, every aspect of your business requires planning, organizing, 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 travelers and monitoring travel expenses, a lot goes into creating a successful corporate travel program.

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

What are the benefits of a managed business travel program?

Travel programs are beneficial to businesses of all sizes. A growing business needs a travel management company (TMC) that will support its corporate travel program so they can scale and evolve. A global organization 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 centralized and easy to find. This also means 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 travel spend. A well-crafted policy also helps you 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 save you up to 70 percent and access to an extensive travel inventory to find the options that fit your travel budget.
• Optimization reporting from Egencia Analytics Studio to find more savings. The Benchmarking dashboard lets you measure your spend against other, similarly sized businesses to use this data to negotiate better hotel and airfare rates.
• Data visualization dashboards make it easy to pull reports on your most traveled routes by individuals or groups, find your CO2 footprint, and understand the impact 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 vacation. We understand this — Egencia was the original innovator in digital corporate travel. We built and own the technology we use for business travel management, allowing us to innovate quickly and deliver a complete and seamless end-to-end travel experience that delights travelers and travel managers.

Egencia meets all your travel needs to help you create and manage a successful corporate travel program. Easily manage traveler profiles, payment options and travel policies, or use risk management tools like Egencia Traveler Tracker to help you locate business travelers in 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.

Travelers 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 travelers and arrangers so they can view any traveler’s complete itinerary to resolve any issue and get them back on the road as soon as possible. These experts provide support around the clock, every day of the year, online or off.

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. Travelers can find in-policy options at the top of their search, making policy compliance easy, encouraging traveler satisfaction, and keeping travel costs under control.

Egencia can deliver the benefit of having the same choices and prices your travelers would get on Hotels.com alongside specifically negotiated corporate rates. Egencia Preferred Rates offer your travelers better value flights 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 gain efficiency in your travel program, save time and money, take care of your travelers, get around-the-clock customer support, and provide you with actionable data.

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

• An insider’s guide to business travel management
• Travel culture: Your competitive advantage in a global market
• Business travel management in a time of crisis
• Why a TMC is vital for savings
• ROI and digital transformation in business travel
• How to protect your travel culture during a recession
• The essential checklist for business travel savings
• A toolkit to redesign your business travel program post COVID-19
• A modern take on business travel procurement
• Simplifying complex travel programs