Corporate travel management software: A complete guide
How to streamline business trips with travel management software
Wondering why companies use corporate travel platforms instead of manual booking or agencies? Streamlining your travel program is essential to cost-effectiveness, whether it’s booking, expensing, or reporting. A corporate travel management platform, like Melon, can save you time and money compared to manual/agency bookings.
Key Takeaways:
- How corporate travel management software centralizes all your data.
- The benefits of full-service platforms over OBTs for analytics, risk management, and support.
- Gaining insights from over 800+ report types in real-time.
- How mobile access, vendor surfacing, and real-time alerts empower your travellers.
- How switching from manual/agency booking to managed travel platforms saves money, time, and improves duty of care.
What is corporate travel management software?
Core capabilities of a travel management platform
Finding the right corporate travel management software means it allows your company to:
- Book and manage your business trips: Control and oversee all your itineraries from any device - anytime, anywhere.
- Keep track of traveller data, profiles, and preferences: Each traveller has a unique profile that includes their preferences and key travel information, enabling you to maximize their well-being with personalized booking options.
- Report on your business travel bookings and travel spend: Leverage custom types of reports to optimize your spend visibility and reduce travel spend leaks.
- Manage your travel policy and mitigate compliance issues and risk: Create custom policies, so you can set clear booking boundaries that will keep your finance teams and travellers happy.
- Consolidate your travel program to keep it streamlined and organized: The best way to streamline data is to consolidate it into a single location for easy access and clear visibility.
When handling your business travel, you likely use different tools, each doing different things. And you might be spending a lot of time jumping between them to complete a task.
You may also have travellers booking their travel ad hoc online with credit cards. They then have to submit expense reports, potentially losing receipts and reservations in the process. A user-friendly travel platform makes it easy to comply with company booking policies and stay organized.
When you work with Corporate Traveller, our travel platform simplifies every part of your business travel management. You'll use a single platform and login to book flights, analyze data, and even keep your people safe.
This corporate travel management guide will walk you through everything you need to know to get your travel program running smoothly and efficiently.
Online booking tool (OBT) vs. full-service travel management platform: What's the difference?
Online booking tools (OBTs) literally only handle your booking transaction for you. That’s it.
When you choose to partner with a full-service corporate travel management platform, its features offer much more versatility and visibility into the types of analytics your organization needs to plan strategically for the future.
Things like policy enforcement, risk management, software integrations, agent support, and of course, invaluable analytical insights are all benefits of using a corporate travel platform, rather than booking through an OBT and being forced to manage the other details manually - if you even can.
How corporate travel booking software works
At its core, corporate travel booking software simplifies booking travel.
It takes all the loaded fares and rates and makes searching, booking, and managing travel easy. But not all online booking tools are created equal, and not all of them are user-friendly—or do everything you really need them to.
When you're comparing TMCs or auditing what your current solution offers, meaning you should have corporate travel management questions like these in the back of your mind:
- Does it have an easy-to-use online booking tool that my travellers will enjoy using?
- Can bookings be made from any device, or do they have to be made on a desktop through travel booking software?
- What sort of rates can we access from the booking software? For example, is it only negotiated rates, or can you access online content, exclusive rates, etc.? Always keep in mind, more range = more choice.
- Is it possible to streamline the approvals process through automation or built-in workflows to reduce time spent on manual approvals?
As a business, efficiency is vital; streamlining or centralizing procedures can help you get there. You'll need to make sure that your travel arrangements are consistent, compliant, and always in policy.
A travel platform like Melon helps you to develop processes that simplify:
Travel policy compliance
You've already gone through the trouble of building a policy that meets all your travellers' needs, but you need to make sure your travellers follow it.
A corporate travel management platform, like Melon, allows you to outline your travel policy in the platform and alerts bookers when they are selecting options outside the company guidelines to help them stay on track.
Travellers are prompted to choose from options that fall within budget and company preferences and, as a bonus, are served flights, hotels, and cars that suit their choices based on past bookings.
Non-compliant booking requests are flagged in real-time, reducing the need for manager intervention and off-policy requests.
Read more about travel policy compliance.
Centralized booking and itinerary management
Booking across different websites and compiling it into one organized itinerary is tricky. Melon brings all the available booking options, including flights, hotels, and transportation, into one platform. Say goodbye to a browser full of open tabs or digging through your search history to find the options you were comparing.
Melon gives you all the airline, hotel chain, and car rental options in one place, so that you can book in just a few minutes. This also minimizes the risk of fragmented bookings or potential booking mistakes.
Being able to access itineraries from any device, not just a desktop, makes it easy to adopt and embrace a travel management platform, whereas some OBTs are only available through desktop-specific software.
Preferred vendor integration
Have a preferred airline? Like a specific hotel bed the most? Collecting car rental loyalty points? Our travel platform, Melon, ensures your preferred vendors come up first so you always find what you're looking for.
When your bookers and travellers see their favourite options come up first, compliance is a breeze. You'll rest assured knowing they're choosing from the negotiated rates and exclusive deals that save your bottom line.
Not only that, but using preferred vendors consistently makes it easier to negotiate better rates when it’s time to reassess, and ultimately, save more on your long-term travel spend.
Approval workflows and trip authorizations
Get off the approvals merry-go-round. With Melon, you can set up a custom approval workflow to make sure that travel requests are routed to the appropriate managers for review. Once approved, Melon takes care of booking the rest.
Automated routing not only saves you turnaround time, but when combined with in-policy automatic booking options, it can drastically reduce the strain on your travel bookers.
Quick. Easy. Streamlined!
Meet Melon.
See how Melon simplifies your business travel program
Melon gives you all your travel needs on one simple platform that's simple, intuitive and synced across devices. Let our travel experts help you create reporting dashboards that make your life easier and get you the data you need.
Who benefits from a corporate travel platform?
When it’s done right, virtually everyone in your organization can benefit from a corporate travel platform:
Finance teams: spend visibility and cost control
Real-time dashboards keep you up-to-date on everything that’s happening with all of your existing itineraries.
Pre-trip approval gates make it easier to prevent budget overruns or fraud. Unused ticket tracking ensures that no bookings go to waste, even when plans change at the last minute.
Plus, there are 800+ reports that you can use in Melon to customize your expense line of sight, both monthly and quarterly, giving you the opportunity to consistently re-evaluate your travel strategies and maximize the impact of your efforts.
HR and travel managers: duty of care and program oversight
Never wonder where your travellers are in transit again with real-time traveller tracking that shows you exactly where they are in their journey, in the air or on the ground. Melon is your single source for the where and when of your ongoing trips.
Policy updates are pushed immediately to all users in your network, so every team member is immediately made aware when there’s a compliance change.
Emergency 24/7 contact for travellers also ensures that no matter what time of day or where they are in the world, your employees are never alone.
Travellers: a smoother, lower-friction experience
Mobile booking gives travellers the freedom to make changes on the go, including preferred vendor surfacing when bookings are being completed.
Real-time alerts and access to live chat anywhere give you and your travellers the peace of mind that no one is ever left wondering what’s going on.
They can enjoy seamless, smooth travel and forget about headaches like managing multiple booking platforms, lost receipts, or dealing with out-of-pocket expenses.
Business travel analytics and reporting
Knowledge is power. Melon provides the analytics to make the calls that can end up saving you big time. Bringing all of your bookings under one platform helps you to identify the patterns and trends of your booking behaviours, and by leveraging these valuable insights, you can optimize and strategize more effectively.
Expense analysis and spend visibility
Curious how much people are spending on hotels? Need help determining how you're tracking your annual budget? Travel analytics are taken from the data of both self-service bookings and agent-assisted bookings to provide a complete picture of your travel expenses.
This allows you as a business to quickly identify any areas of overspending or leakage and implement cost-saving measures. Plus, both your self-service and agent-assisted booking feed their data into the same pool, eliminating any potential blind spots.
Travel behaviour patterns and booking trends
Frequent travel to Tokyo? Travellers selecting luxury over budget-conscious options? You'll quickly and clearly see the patterns by analyzing your booking data and easily identify common travel routes, preferred airlines, and hotel choices to optimize the booking experience further.
Understanding this information leads to smoother negotiations with travel providers when trying to secure better rates or knowing how to tweak the algorithm in the platform to deliver more appropriate choices to your team.
All this data also empowers your business the next time you’re at the negotiation table with your suppliers, making it easier to negotiate better rates based on your preferred vendors.
Policy compliance monitoring
Listen, nobody likes having to police their travellers or micromanage their bookings. It's so much better if you can give them the freedom to book how they want to, while being assured they’ll comply with company policy.
Real-time travel analytics help ensure employees stick to corporate travel policies, and non-compliance can be flagged and addressed promptly. Bookers get a flag if they try to book off-policy, and when it’s requested, it’s sent to the appropriate manager instantly for either approval or denial.
This leads to better control over travel-related expenses, and potential issues can be dealt with as they occur.
Budget forecasting and future planning
Crystal balls don’t exist, but historical data can help you predict future travel costs more accurately. You'll build more realistic budgets and be able to allocate your resources more effectively if you know how to see booking patterns.
What reports can finance and leadership teams access?
With Melon, you can pull more than 800 types of reports, so the insights are plentiful. Behind that travel platform is an entire world of travel reports! And while some customers and industries need to keep trips organized by project codes, others may need to look at bookings by destination, office location, you name it!
It's not uncommon for businesses to want to report on their carbon footprint, compliance, and unused travel credits or to understand their travellers' out-of-pocket expenses. Whatever you're looking for, there's a report for that.
Looking to determine how much you’re spending Month-over-Month? Year-over-Year? What’s the average hotel rate your travellers are booking? How much have flight costs increased for your team since last year? There are reports to answer all these questions accurately - and much, much more.
Travel risk management and duty of care
Anticipating risks, monitoring traveller safety, and providing support before and through all stages of a disruption are all core parts of traveller duty of care.
Whether your team is travelling near or far, duty of care is a top priority for every business that travels. Having a travel risk management dashboard in your stack gives you peace of mind that they’re always safe.
Melon's built-in traveller tracking and risk management dashboard lets you rest assured that you and your team will be immediately updated about disruptions, travel alerts, and plan changes when they occur.
You'll have access to:
Real-time disruption alerts
These systems regularly monitor global events and provide real-time alerts about potential disruptions like political instability, natural disasters, or health concerns.
Traveller tracking and location visibility
This is especially helpful for companies with teams of people travelling to multiple destinations. The dashboard makes it simple to locate employees' whereabouts during travel. In an emergency, you'll be able to locate and assist affected travellers immediately.
24/7 communication and expert support
Whether your team is in a destination and could use a hand, or you're at home and need a quick solution after-hours, corporate travel management is what you need. With Melon's live-chat function, you'll be in touch with a travel expert who knows what to do in minutes. Anytime, anywhere in the world.
Emergency response protocols
Melon makes it simple to know who to call when and if an emergency arises. Your team can easily see their designated contact and access assistance in just a few clicks. You can also incorporate your emergency plans in your travel policy, which outlines the procedures for risky scenarios.
Key features of corporate travel management software
When you’re exploring potential corporate travel management platforms, look for features that cover booking, management, analytics, and traveller experience. Without one of these pieces, your travel program can never reach peak efficiency.
Mobile app and on-the-go access
Here are some key features to look for in a business travel management app:
- Itinerary management: The Melon app provides a centralized platform for storing and accessing itineraries, eliminating the need for printed documents. Travellers can see their travel schedules, booking details, and important updates with a few taps.
- Flight and hotel bookings: Integrated booking features allow travel bookers and travellers to search, compare, and book flights and hotels directly through the app, and it's simple for your team to stick to company policies.
- Real-time updates: Some travel apps will inform you about flight delays, gate changes, and other crucial information in real-time. This minimizes disruptions and lets travellers adapt their plans right away.
- Communication tools: The Melon app features a live chat that enables your travellers to connect with expert travel consultants anywhere. We'll even streamline your search and give you nine other business travel apps that you should find particularly useful!
Single sign-on and multi-device platform access
You’ll only need a single login when you use Melon, because it works seamlessly across your desktop platform, or from your phone or tablet.
No more irritating multiple log-ins to remember or forgetting which password goes with which account. It’s the best way to simplify your access across multiple devices.
Integrations and expense tool compatibility
Managed corporate travel platforms have the benefit of connecting directly with your expense tools, HR systems, and finance platforms. All your data can flow seamlessly from one tool to the next, making it easier to keep every department happy.
Corporate travel platform vs. manual booking: Why it matters
Manual booking with personal credit cards is an irritating situation when travellers have to use their personal cards and then wait for repayment. Setting up a company card through your travel management platform empowers employees to make bookings without taking on the expense themselves at first.
Stand-alone OBTs silo booking data and make it difficult to compile and collect all your expense information promptly. Using a corporate travel platform, like Melon, means that all your booking information is centralized in a single, easy-to-access location for all your team members.
Agency-only booking solutions take the stress—and the power—out of your hands. It may work for some companies, but if you want to be able to control and adjust your travel program internally at any point, you’ll want a corporate travel management platform, rather than an agency-only solution.
The hidden costs of manual travel booking
Delayed expense reports slow down the entire travel management process, in addition to being a common place for spend leaks to occur.
Lost receipts only further complicate the process, making it more difficult for travellers to seek repayment or for accounting teams to verify the legitimacy of those expenses. This is worsened when your company has a lack of policy enforcement or policy drift.
Worse yet, a lack of duty of care oversight can be an extremely costly expense for both your business and your travellers.
Self-booking vs. managed travel: the traveller experience
Self-booking completely changes your travellers’ experiences, since they won’t get to enjoy the benefits of corporate travel platform features like real-time alerts, preferred vendor surfacing, loyalty point tracking support, or 24/7 live-chat support.
Melon does all of those things, and more, so if you want to continue handling some elements of self-booking, you can. But whenever you need that extra bit of support or guidance, Melon and Corporate Traveller’s team has your back.
A travel platform that grows with your business
Using a corporate travel platform vs manual booking as your travel program grows helps establish sustainable scalability. More travellers need more support, more reports give you more visibility into your analytics, and more integrations keep every department running smoothly.
If you’re ready to give yourself a competitive advantage with data-driven travel management, then it’s time you consider giving Melon a try for yourself.
