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5 Reasons How a Corporate Travel Agency Can Help Your Company Save Time and Money
Only thinking about the idea of making corporate travel savings may sound challenging, especially when you have many employees who are traveling to many locations in a short period of time.
However, what if we told you that there are actually many ways to keep your costs down and even save lots of time while you are at it. With the proper implementations, not only will you be saving time and money, but you will be much happier about it as well.
According to a study, the average cost of a work trip is nearly $2,000 and takes time to set up. This amount isn’t low and adds up on each trip your employees go on. The last thing you want is to only be making income for paying all of your corporate traveling expenses!
So we know the statistics now. In this article, we will show you how a corporate travel agency can assist us in saving time and money.
Let’s dive right in!
5 reasons a corporate travel agency can save you time and money
1. Corporate travel policy
Booking flight management, managing expenses, and many other things need to be handled while you are setting up a corporate travel policy. Manually doing it sometimes can be an issue as you might slip through some data. Not only that, but when you make a mistake, it will cost you lots of time as well.
Corporate travel agencies do a great job setting up these corporate travel policies and cover every area of travel expenses you have made within your company. Along with your corporate travel policies, you should focus on providing the proper guidelines such as bookings, reservations, expenses, and even on-site spendings.
You hire your employees to do the job you hired them for. Whether it is to promote your product or service, make a sale, communicate with clients, or any other valuable activity that may arise.
You don’t want your employees to spend time booking hotels, car rentals, or even flights. In short, if you are doing this, employee productivity is dropping, which goes against your own business strategy because of the tremendous amount of time taken to complete these tasks. Time is money, so you don’t want to put your employees through these scenarios.
Clear corporate policies make decision-making easier for your travelers and even for your business in general. If you haven’t set one up, then it is time to do so.
2. Discounts
Yes, you heard about it. Businesses can hire corporate travel agencies with an established relationship with many different companies such as hotels, airlines, and even car rentals. The agencies that have a relationship with these companies will also get lower prices from them. This is beneficial for you since it can significantly reduce costs.
Discounts add up each time and even make it easier for your employee travelers to get orientated when traveling somewhere.
These mutual understandings allow your company to get anywhere from a 5% to 10% discount or even more when hopping on a flight, renting a car, or even staying in a hotel. Discounts won’t only help your business save yearly, but the more frequent your employees are going on a business trip, the more these savings will accumulate over time.
Additionally, these mutual partnerships save you time when your employees are traveling because corporate travel agency partners will re-direct you for everything you need. It can always get complicating once you go to another country, so these mutual understandings are helpful when on the road!
3. Employee retention
Going on a trip may be stressful from time to time. From the planning phase up until the day you actual to your destination. A corporate travel agency does a great job of reducing the stress that accumulates with traveling. According to a business study, 45% of business travelers mentioned that they had lots of stress during international trips.
“There are a lot of travel restrictions to navigate these days. Having a corporate travel agent who can help you schedule your Covid test and ensure you have all of the proper paperwork and documentation before your flight can make things much easier.” says Rebecca Gunter from Covid Tests.
Travel agencies usually provide you with automated platforms that can help prepare everything about traveling with much ease. Furthermore, you get a corporate travel professional assigned to you, which will help you throughout every process from the beginning to the end. The best part about this is that you deal with a human being and not some AI assistant.
A corporate travel manager seeks to help businesses save time and money throughout the short and long term. With the many years of experience that they have, these managers can set realistic goals of reducing overall business travel costs. You and your employees can go to sleep with ease when you think about the fact that you don’t have to deal with all these procedures.
Even if something happens during the trip, the corporate travel manager will make adjustments. These kinds of managers allow your employees to be stress-free and happy even on a business trip. This directly impacts long-term loyalty within your company and makes them not worry about anything else during an international trip.
4. Flexibility
What is so good about getting the correct travel management is the amount of flexibility you get from it. Especially during the period of a COVID-19 pandemic, surprises are happening and can happen out of nowhere. You might get your flight canceled one day before, or a random lockdown may occur the next day; you can’t really ever predict it!
Moreover, when you are dealing with an airline or car rental agency you don’t know, you might not get any response when negotiating for adjustments, or even if you do, you will need to pay more for it. Generally speaking, your costs will only increase and most likely just be a waste of time. In short, it isn’t something fun to do.
Corporate travel agencies offer flexible management that saves you time and money when these situations arise. Corporate travel managers will deal with these surprises that arise, and the best part is that they will always seek to find quick solutions to these problems.
No one ever said business traveling is cheap, but expenses can greatly reduce when a corporate travel manager handles all these issues. In addition to that, let’s not forget about how much time and stress you are getting off your shoulders with these kinds of managers.
5. Allows you to reward employees
Your company will have more money to use from the time and money you are saving from corporate travel agencies. After some years, the amount of money you have saved will really add up. So, what can you do with the money you saved? Invest? Sure, that is a good idea, but what about rewarding your employees?
Every employee takes the courage to go on an international trip. It isn’t as easy as it seems, but you can really offer your employees some great rewards with the money you have saved. Maybe it can be some discount at their favorite restaurant, a bonus in their paycheck, an extra day off- just a method of saying thank you to them to show your gratitude.
With the vast amount of time saved from corporate travel agencies, your business should focus more on corporate rewards.
Corporate rewards aren’t expensive and only include rewards you can give to your employees after they return from their business traveling. After all, they took the courage to go on the trip, and now it is time to pay them back as a reward.
Therefore, to boost team morale, create motivation and increase productivity, corporate awards are a necessary step; ordering plaques and crystal awards for high-performing employees who have shown good results in a given period is a great way to appreciate their effort.
Wrapping it up
Well, that’s about it for this article. These were our five reasons on how a corporate travel agency can help you save lots of time and money. Throughout business travel history, expenses have always been a huge issue to deal with and now there are many solutions to it.
This article goes through an in-depth research of the main reasons you should consider using a corporate travel agency. You don’t have time to worry about minor things that shouldn’t be managed by you or your employees. That is why it is smart to delegate them to people who work specifically in that industry.
Corporate travel agencies seek to save your business the most valuable resources you have, and that is your time and money. So, we recommend you spend time thinking about it and carefully read through each reason we gave you on why you should use a corporate travel agency!