As a business leader, you probably don’t need to be told that inflation is squeezing margins across business divisions. This includes rising business travel costs impacting business travel programs everywhere working to make the most of their budgets. During times of economic uncertainty, outside travel management expertise can benefit teams that are under pressure and unsure of what’s next.
Sales and account management personnel rely on travel to close on prospects and drive the revenue that makes corporate travel budgets so valuable. But they are also a big expense and costs can quickly get out of control. For many businesses, travel budgets are the second largest expense after employee salaries. That’s before you include the costs of managing travel in-house, whether it’s with an organized program or having employees manage their own travel.
Understanding a
Changing Travel Landscape
Whether you are managing travel in-house or are currently using an outside management firm, you may feel there are blind spots in your current travel program. These uncertainties are likely to grow as national and global economic conditions change.
Reports indicate that business travel costs could rise anywhere from 30%-50% overall over the next year, introducing a reality that will no doubt change your business expectations.
The primary drivers of this are increased costs to fly, geopolitical turmoil, inflation, and pent-up demand. These pressures require managers to see higher ROI from their travel budgets.
That’s today, but what about tomorrow? Or the next fiscal year? Conditions aren’t expected to radically change over the next several years. But with signs of a mild recessionary environment emerging, the need to move quickly to drive results is paramount.
Interestingly, a confluence of trends could come together to raise overall costs even as airline travel and the fuel it relies on fall in price. Hotels could raise their prices as demand returns, even as inflationary pressures remain close to the same. Monitoring and responding to price fluctuations is clearly not just a short-term challenge.
However, feedback from travel analysts and hotel chain leaders demonstrates an expectation that, on the whole, travel will continue and the current environment still presents tremendous value to business travelers.
Addressing Challenges
Corporate travel budgets are often managed by a few individuals. It’s only natural that errors are made and opportunities to boost travel value are missed. That’s why a team that focuses on both optimizing travel spending and boosting ROI and knowing your business goals. We believe it’s this combination of goals that helps improve the value of your business travel program. Our proactive team of corporate travel advisors provides unrivaled personalized service and is your source of business travel management best practices.
How We Can Help
Maximizing business travel value in a challenging economic environment is what The Travel Team does. With a mix of digital tools and a culture of exemplary customer service, we are the point people for whenever uncertainty over business travel ROI strikes. The following solutions by improving travel value by helping you streamline your travel and make the most of accommodations, travel itineraries, and destination options in closing deals and driving revenue.
As a member of Concur’s Elite Partner program, we use the proven online booking tool SAP Concur for a better-managed, more nimble travel program. We have the skills and experience to tailor this all-in-one SaaS travel management system, including Concur Expense, to your business needs, giving you access to up-to-the-minute travel data for more freedom and confidence.
We’ll work with you directly to build, use, and maintain your Concur environment for added transparency and flexibility so you can be as hands-on (or off) as you’d like in finding the right accommodations and developing high-value itineraries. We can also automate and integrate the program with your systems so we can streamline purchasing and vendor management.
The Travel Team also focuses on the human element of your travel program. After all, you count on it to put your employees in a position to succeed. But it can be difficult for them to do just that when managing their own travel or constantly reporting to in-house management teams. That’s why we make the effort to get to know you and your business so that communication with our advisors is proactive and insightful.
We’re proud of being a TMC big enough to effectively deploy tools like SAP Concur while remaining small enough that we don’t lose sight of our customers. All software and vendor management in the world doesn’t mean anything if you cannot deliver a quality customer experience. With The Travel Team, you can always expect prompt service befitting a premier partner in business travel management.
