Business travel is experiencing a significant resurgence, marking a strong recovery after the financial downturn of 2008 and the unprecedented standstill caused by the recent pandemic. As companies confidently send their teams back on the road, a familiar challenge resurfaces: the complexities of booking and managing business travel. The traditional methods of handling corporate travel are often time-consuming and inefficient, placing unnecessary burdens on employees and finance departments alike.
For many organizations still relying on outdated processes, booking business trips remains a significant headache. Imagine employees struggling to decipher intricate travel policies, spending hours searching for budget-friendly flights and accommodations, using personal funds or company cards for bookings, and then painstakingly compiling proof of purchase upon their return. This antiquated approach is not only frustrating for employees but also creates administrative overhead and potential compliance issues for businesses.
Fortunately, the solution lies in embracing modern technology. The digital age offers a wealth of tools designed to automate, centralize, and simplify every aspect of business travel management. The key to unlocking seamless and efficient corporate travel is adopting a comprehensive Business Travel Platform.
These innovative platforms are revolutionizing how companies handle travel, offering streamlined solutions to manage bookings, expenses, and itineraries. Let’s explore some of the leading tools that can transform your company’s approach to business travel, turning a complex process into a smooth and efficient operation.
Top Business Travel Booking Platforms
The initial hurdle for most business travelers is the booking process itself. While they know their destination and duration of travel, navigating the intricacies of booking flights, hotels, and transportation can be daunting. Companies typically address this in one of two ways: assigning a dedicated travel buyer or administrator to handle bookings, or empowering employees to book their own travel while adhering to company policies.
The latter approach, self-booking with clear guidelines, is increasingly favored, with nearly half of business travelers preferring the autonomy to manage their own arrangements. However, this requires providing employees with user-friendly tools and ensuring complete visibility and control over travel expenditures.
Here are some of the best business travel platforms designed to simplify corporate travel booking and management:
1. TravelPerk: Your All-in-One Business Travel Platform
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Streamline business travel bookings with TravelPerk, a comprehensive business travel platform offering a vast inventory of flights, hotels, and more in one centralized location.
Booking business travel traditionally involves navigating a maze of websites, comparing options, and ensuring compliance with company policies. This fragmented approach can lead to wasted time, frustration, and inconsistencies. TravelPerk addresses this challenge by consolidating the world’s largest travel inventory into a single, user-friendly business travel platform.
Similar to popular consumer travel sites, TravelPerk aggregates flights, hotels, trains, and car rentals from various providers into a unified dashboard and mobile app. This centralized platform eliminates the need for employees to bounce between multiple websites, streamlining the booking process and saving valuable time. For finance teams, the benefits are even more significant. By centralizing all company travel bookings on one platform, TravelPerk simplifies tracking expenses and generating comprehensive reports.
Unlike consumer-focused travel websites, TravelPerk is specifically designed for businesses. It understands the unique record-keeping and reporting needs of corporate travel. The platform provides clear visibility into who booked which trip, when, and for what purpose, ensuring accountability and facilitating budget management.
The integration between TravelPerk and Spendesk further enhances its capabilities as a comprehensive business travel platform. This powerful integration offers:
- Automation: Automatic synchronization of invoices, eliminating manual data entry.
- Approval Workflows: Streamlined approval processes to prevent duplicate bookings and ensure policy compliance.
- Accounting Tools: Seamless export of detailed journal entries into your existing accounting systems.
This integration empowers finance teams to grant employees booking autonomy while maintaining control and real-time visibility over all travel expenditures, making TravelPerk a truly robust business travel solution.
2. Airbnb for Work: A Versatile Business Travel Platform for Unique Accommodation and More
You might be familiar with Airbnb for personal travel, but Airbnb for Work offers a tailored business travel platform experience with features designed specifically for corporate needs. While it shares the vast accommodation options of the consumer version, Airbnb for Work introduces key functionalities beneficial for businesses.
The core differences that set Airbnb for Work apart as a valuable business travel platform include:
- Company-Linked Bookings: All bookings are linked to the company profile, allowing finance teams to easily access booking details and invoices without chasing individual employees for information.
- Beyond Accommodation: Airbnb for Work extends beyond overnight stays, offering spaces for meetings, conferences, and even temporary office rentals. This versatility makes it a comprehensive solution for various business travel needs.
- Team-Building Experiences: Airbnb Experiences provide opportunities for booking team-building activities, ideal for companies traveling with groups and looking to enhance team cohesion during business trips.
According to Ashley Schmitz, Regional Lead Executive Assistant for Campari America, “With the dashboard, we can view where all of our employees are traveling and where they are staying, as well as the average rate that we are spending and the cost savings that we have every year.” Airbnb for Work provides businesses with enhanced tracking and visibility, solidifying its position as a capable business travel platform.
If your team enjoys the variety and flexibility of Airbnb for personal travel, Airbnb for Work extends these benefits while providing companies with the necessary tools to track and manage corporate travel bookings efficiently.
3. TravelBank: A Centralized Business Travel Platform with Integrated Expense Management
TravelBank, similar to TravelPerk, functions as a centralized business travel platform that empowers employees to book all their travel arrangements in one place. This unified approach simplifies the entire travel lifecycle, from initial booking to trip completion and expense reporting. Providing employees with a central hub for booking and payment significantly improves efficiency and user experience.
However, TravelBank distinguishes itself as a business travel platform with its strong emphasis on integrated expense report management. Users appreciate its seamless expense reporting features, allowing them to easily screenshot receipts for flights and ground transportation. The platform then automatically matches these receipts to charges on company cards, streamlining and automating the often-dreaded expense reporting process.
This automation significantly reduces the administrative burden associated with expense reports, a pain point for both employees and finance teams. TravelBank also incorporates an innovative feature that incentivizes responsible spending. Individual travelers can earn personal rewards for staying within budget or finding cost-effective travel options, encouraging mindful spending habits while traveling for business. This unique reward system further enhances TravelBank’s appeal as a smart business travel platform.
4. Flightfox: Leveraging Expert Travel Agents within a Business Travel Platform
For companies hesitant to completely abandon the personalized service of travel agents, Flightfox offers a unique hybrid approach. It leverages a network of experienced travel experts to assist business travelers in booking optimal travel arrangements, all within a modern, online business travel platform framework.
Flightfox combines the human touch of traditional travel agents with the convenience of online platforms. Instead of visiting a physical travel agency, users simply input their travel details online and gain access to a team of travel professionals. Flightfox’s manifesto emphasizes transparency and expertise: “At Flightfox, we are solving business travel complexity by being transparent with fees. We focus purely on becoming genuine experts in travel and maximizing the value we deliver to you.”
User reviews consistently highlight satisfaction with the personalized service and expertise provided by Flightfox agents. These experts can often access exclusive deals and identify optimal travel itineraries that individual travelers might miss when booking independently. Flightfox effectively brings the benefits of a dedicated travel agent team to businesses of all sizes through its accessible business travel platform.
Business Travel Platforms for Managing Travel Spending
Controlling and monitoring travel spending is a critical aspect of business travel management. Companies often grapple with a mix of payment methods, including company cards, invoices, wire transfers, and employee reimbursements. Tracking each payment, assigning expenses to the correct individuals and teams, and adhering to budgets can become overwhelming without the right tools. Business travel platforms that incorporate robust expense management features are essential for maintaining financial control.
These platforms simplify the process of tracking travel expenses, providing transparency and control over who is spending what, where, and when.
5. Spendesk: A Comprehensive Business Travel Platform for Secure and Controlled Spending
How do your teams currently handle travel payments? From online flight bookings to hotel payments and incidental expenses, each transaction contributes to overall travel spending. However, reconciling various payment methods and linking them to specific trips and employees can be challenging. For instance, if an employee books flights using a company card and later incurs expenses using personal funds, linking these transactions to the same trip and user becomes a manual and time-consuming task.
Spendesk addresses this challenge by providing a business travel platform that offers diverse payment methods all linked to individual users. Employees can utilize virtual credit cards for online bookings and physical prepaid expense cards for on-the-go expenses. Because both payment methods are assigned to individual users, Spendesk provides clear accountability and spending visibility, unlike traditional company cards.
Furthermore, if employees need to use personal funds, Spendesk simplifies expense reporting by allowing them to automatically generate reports and link them to their user profile. This ensures that all spending is accurately tracked and attributed to the correct individual and trip. Real-time expense logging within Spendesk empowers finance teams to monitor spending as it occurs, a significant improvement over traditional expense report processes that often occur at the end of the month. In essence, Spendesk functions as a secure and comprehensive business travel platform when spending control and security are paramount.
6. Spendee: A User-Friendly Expense Tracking App for Business Travelers
For businesses not yet ready to implement a dedicated enterprise-level expense management solution, Spendee offers a practical and accessible alternative. This user-friendly mobile app enables real-time expense tracking and receipt capture. While not specifically designed for business use, Spendee serves as a valuable tool for traveling employees to meticulously track their spending while on the road, ensuring no expense, regardless of size, is overlooked.
Spendee enhances visibility by allowing users to grant access to managers or finance team members, providing transparency into travel-related purchases. This makes Spendee a simple yet effective solution for businesses seeking to improve expense tracking without investing in a full-fledged business travel platform for expense management.
Additional Tools that Enhance Business Travel Platforms
While booking and expense management are primary concerns, other tools and services can further optimize the business travel experience. These extras integrate seamlessly with business travel platforms to enhance convenience and support for traveling employees.
Here are a few noteworthy additions:
7. TripIt: Your Personal Itinerary Organizer within a Business Travel Platform Ecosystem
TripIt acts as a digital travel itinerary organizer, seamlessly integrating with various business travel platforms. Users simply forward confirmation emails for flights, hotels, and other bookings to TripIt, and the tool automatically compiles a comprehensive itinerary accessible via phone or computer, anytime, anywhere.
TripIt goes beyond basic itinerary aggregation by providing maps and directions to navigate between locations within the itinerary. The premium TripIt Pro version includes features like Seat Tracker, assisting travelers in selecting optimal seating on flights. With a free version available, TripIt offers valuable itinerary management features for all business travelers, enhancing the functionality of any business travel platform.
8. Google Travel: A Powerful Travel Planning and Information Hub
Google Travel, evolving from Google Trips, serves as a robust travel planning tool and information aggregator. It embodies Google’s strength in consolidating vast amounts of information into a single, accessible platform. Google Travel eliminates the need to juggle multiple websites and resources when planning business trips. It centralizes flight and hotel searches, activity suggestions, maps, weather forecasts, and deal comparisons, all in one user-friendly interface, functioning as a powerful auxiliary tool for any business travel platform.
All travel information is securely stored within the user’s Google account, ensuring easy access and organization. Confirmations sent to Gmail accounts are automatically incorporated into the itinerary. Google Travel also provides up-to-date COVID-19 travel advisories and information relevant to the destination, an essential feature in the current travel landscape. While not exclusively for business travelers, Google Travel’s comprehensive planning capabilities and information aggregation make it an invaluable resource for anyone managing travel arrangements, complementing the features of a dedicated business travel platform.
9. AirHelp: Empowering Business Travelers with Flight Disruption Assistance
What happens when travel plans go awry? When a team member faces flight disruptions like rerouting or cancellation, do they know their rights and available options? AirHelp provides travelers with crucial information regarding their passenger rights. In cases of significant flight delays or cancellations, AirHelp informs travelers about potential compensation eligibility and guides them through the claims process.
Many business travelers are unaware of their rights in such situations, often assuming disruptions are simply unavoidable inconveniences. AirHelp empowers them to understand their entitlements and potentially recoup costs associated with flight disruptions, benefiting both the traveler and the company’s travel budget. By equipping teams with AirHelp, businesses ensure travelers are informed and supported when unexpected travel issues arise, adding a layer of security and support to any business travel platform strategy.
10. PackPoint: The Smart Packing Assistant for Business Trips
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Ensure you are fully prepared for every business trip with PackPoint, a smart packing app that creates customized packing lists based on your destination, travel dates, and planned activities.
Forgetting an item on a personal vacation might be a minor inconvenience, but overlooking essential items on a business trip can have significant repercussions. PackPoint is a smart packing app designed to prevent such oversights. It helps users create and manage packing lists tailored specifically for business travel. Users can check off items as they pack, ensuring they don’t forget critical necessities like laptops, chargers, presentations, important documents, and other trip-essential items.
PackPoint intelligently generates packing lists based on destination weather forecasts, trip duration, and planned activities. By inputting trip details, the app provides a guided packing experience, taking the guesswork out of pre-trip preparations. Using PackPoint provides peace of mind, allowing travelers to relax and focus on their business objectives, knowing they are well-prepared for their trip, enhancing the overall efficiency of business travel managed through a business travel platform.
Test Drive Business Travel Platforms for Optimal Efficiency
These ten tools represent a range of solutions designed to streamline and optimize business travel management. The next step is to explore these business travel platforms and identify the ones that best align with your company’s specific needs and priorities.
As you evaluate different platforms, keep these key objectives in mind:
- Empower Travelers with Flexibility and Choice: Seek platforms that offer travelers autonomy and control over their booking preferences.
- Real-Time Tracking and Spending Management: Prioritize platforms providing real-time visibility into travel spending and budget adherence.
- Maintain Finance Team Control: Ensure the chosen platform provides finance teams with the necessary oversight and control over travel policies and expenditures.
- Maximize Time Savings: Select platforms that automate and streamline processes, minimizing administrative overhead and saving valuable time for both employees and administrators.
If a business travel platform under consideration fails to address one or more of these core objectives, it might not be the ideal solution for your organization. By carefully evaluating your needs and exploring the available options, you can select the right business travel platform to transform your company’s approach to corporate travel, making it more efficient, cost-effective, and traveler-friendly.
Happy travels!
