7 Ways to Save Money on Business Travel as an SME
our top tips for small & medium businesses looking to get the best value travelAre you looking to stretch your travel budget that little bit further?
Business travel can be a significant expense for any company, but especially for small & medium enterprises (SMEs). Fortunately, there are several strategies SMEs can implement to save money without sacrificing efficiency or the well-being of their travellers.
From ensuring your TMC offers comprehensive content across all channels – including access to the best rates on flights, hotels, rail, car rentals, and more – to analysing traveller behaviours and leveraging advance purchase prices, you can significantly reduce costs… if you know how.
In this article, we identify 7 key areas where SMEs can optimise their business travel budget, book better, and spend smarter.
1. Comprehensive Content
At Gray Dawes, we believe that content is king. Ensuring that your TMC delivers full content across all channels, not just a single Global Distribution System (GDS), is absolutely crucial if you’re looking to make savings. Content sources to look out for include:
- New Distribution Capability (NDC) airfares.
- Full low-cost airline inventory
- Hotel content inclusive of retailers such as Booking.com and Expedia
- Full, global rail inventory, including European carriers and Amtrak in the USA
Make sure that all of this content is made available to you in one system, such as in our booking tool YourTrip.
2. Purchase in Advance
Planning out your travel in plenty of time and booking early is a tried and tested way of making significant savings on both personal and professional trips.
It is best practice to ensure that all tickets are purchased up to 28 days before departure where possible. To make things easier, consider introducing a policy in your travel programme that mandates all bookings are made 21 to 28 days before a trip. This will help drive compliance and adapt the booking behaviours of your travellers too.
Our "High Content" Promise
3. Analyse Traveller Behaviour
Your travellers are one of the biggest resources you have at your disposal. The ways in which they travel, and when and where they like to do it, is invaluable information that can be used to drive big cost savings.
Make sure to analyse the behaviours of your bookers and identify what type of tickets or reservations they are purchasing. If they are buying more expensive flexible rates, find out whether they are actually using that flexibility or if it is being used solely as a safety net.
This analysis should apply to air, hotel, and rail bookings. For example, ensuring that hotels are booked at the same time as a flight often gives bookers the option to grab a discounted package deal which can be much more efficient and economical.
4. Drive Online Adoption
Are all of your travellers using the business travel tools at their disposal? If they’re not, you could be seeing significant “leakage”, meaning that you’re losing money to travellers going solo and booking their own trips.
It’s important to take the time to drive online adoption of your chosen booking tool. The meteoric rise of technology over the past few years means that it is not always necessary to book complicated “bespoke” itineraries offline. All of your needs can and should be met online – a place where you can take full advantage of lower service fees.
Training is an important part of this requirement. Understand your travellers’ reasons for not booking online and provide training to drive high online adoption rates with increased user confidence.
5. Introduce Approval Processes
Getting travellers to comply with your travel programme can be tricky, especially if they think they can find it cheaper on the internet (something which we NEVER hear).
Consider introducing an approval process to ensure compliance with a travel program. Take the time to introduce rate caps for key destinations and establish methodologies for securing the best available air fares on the day of purchase. Any reservations that fall outside of policy should be sent for approval, stating the reason for non-policy adherence.
6. Monitor Unused Tickets
It’s surprising how many tickets are left unused and not reported back to the agent for refunds. Don’t miss out on getting your money back when travel plans don’t materialise.
Ensure that you have a traveller-to-agent refund process in place. This process should be easy to navigate and have the power to automatically monitor the usage of tickets and/or reservations and flag them for refund if they go unused.
7. Utilise Airline Points Schemes
Signing up to the loyalty schemes of your most frequently used service providers can lead to significant savings alongside other brilliant perks.
Loyalty schemes, such as British Airway’s OnBusiness or Miles & More by Lufthansa, are often overlooked when it comes to managing a travel budget. Points awarded via such schemes can quickly accumulate and minimise future travel costs.
Your TMC should be able to provide you with the ability to redeem points from a whole range of schemes, as well as track and report them as savings via your Management Information (MI) reports.
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