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HOW TO GET BETTER ROI ON BUSINESS TRAVEL.






HOW TO GET BETTER ROI ON BUSINESS TRAVEL.


WITH THE RISING FREQUENCY AND IMPORTANCE OF BUSINESS TRAVEL, THE NUMBERS HAVE TO
ADD UP.


It’s official: business travel is increasing again. According to Deloitte,
spending for corporate travel is expected to reach 2019 levels again by late
2024 or early 2025, with in-person attendance at industry events driving the
bulk of the spending. What’s clear is that in the ongoing post-pandemic recovery
of the last few years, business travel is poised to meet and even surpass its
pre-2020 levels. Executives at all levels, from CFOs to travel managers should
be prepared to adapt to these changes — creating opportunities for their
employees to meet in person while still keeping costs under control.

In July 2023, we surveyed more than 200 travel and expense management
decision-makers at US companies, and not only did they confirm these trends but
also offered insights into what’s driving the recovery and how current patterns
have made the management of business travel more complex.

Here are the key considerations for finance leaders like you who are in the same
position and need to ensure they are tracking travel, automating controls, and
improving ROI:


 * Nearly every company in our survey (98%) rated travel as important to
   achieving its business goals, with three-quarters declaring it “very
   important.”

 * More than 75% of companies in our survey said they had boosted their travel
   allocation in the last 12 months.

 * The shift toward hybrid work, now the most popular model for companies, is a
   primary reason for this increase — nearly half of respondents said that
   having more employees outside of company offices led to bigger travel budget

To increase the ROI of travel, you need to improve the business outcome or
decrease travel costs — or ideally both at the same time. The way you do that is
with an integrated T&E solution that is easy for employees to use, automates
more of the process, and automatically enforces policies to keep everyone on
budget.

Below, we dig even deeper into what the data tell us about the state of travel
today, and how businesses can implement solutions that solve today's common
business travel challenges.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

MOST T&E SOLUTIONS LACK ADEQUATE AUTOMATION & VISIBILITY.


Among our respondents, they identified a dozen different T&E solutions in use,
ranging from legacy vendors to market disruptors. A common set of complaints
emerged, with many stemming from a lack of automation and limited visibility
into overall costs and returns. Other pain points included:


 * Ease of use, which was cited as a “main challenge” by 42%.

 * Slow reimbursements (32%) and time-consuming expense approvals (32%) due to
   manual processes and lack of automation.

 * 31% of respondents expressed problems integrating with other software, such
   as accounting systems.

 * 29% highlighted difficulty with employees failing to submit documentation for
   their expenses.

These difficulties are compounding on each other now that travel is coming back
quickly. They have the potential to impede the productivity and efficiency of
employees distributed globally; overburden managers and accounting teams; and
lead to poor compliance, leakage, and low travel program adoption.





--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

POOR FEE TRANSPARENCY ALSO HINDERS ROI IMPROVEMENT.


Improving ROI on business travel isn’t just closing the deal when you get to
where you’re going. It’s also about how much you spent on the trip and the
systems that enabled it. Unfortunately, many companies aren’t clear on their
travel program costs, which inhibits their ability to calculate the ROI of
business travel.

Some 88% of leaders said cost savings and travel management fee reductions are a
priority, and that they wish to implement strategies like restricting employees
from booking expensive flight classes and requiring advance bookings and
preapprovals for going over budget, two tactics used by 44% and 42% of
companies, respectively.

Among our survey respondents, only 58% said that they understand all their fees,
while 39% said they understand some but not all. When it’s a herculean effort
just to find out how much you're paying for your corporate travel program — and
you’re paying multiple SaaS bills for different types of spend — you’re
constraining your ROI before anyone even sets foot on a plane.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

CONTROLLING COSTS IS A TOP PRIORITY.


Companies are addressing travel budget overages and actively trying to rein in
travel expenses without cutting back on important and business-critical trips
and group events. In fact, 62% of respondents to our survey said that actual
travel costs in 2022 were higher than projected, with 20% saying they were
significantly higher.

Part of the challenge is also that some companies are still settling into the
groove of a distributed workforce. The fully remote companies that we spoke to
said actual costs were higher than they had expected, and half of them said
costs exceeded projections by a whopping 50% or more.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

WHAT COMPANIES NEED TO IMPROVE THE ROI OF BUSINESS TRAVEL: REAL-TIME AUTOMATION,
TRACKING, AND INSIGHTS.


All of these shortcomings of T&E solutions have led companies to understand
exactly what they want in a corporate travel solution. Survey respondents have
set a high bar for their dream T&E solution and show a strong desire to
consolidate SaaS spend:





That last point is critical. One of our respondents’ biggest priorities: wanting
all of their T&E functionality to be fast and automated. Finance leaders
expressed a strong desire for AI-enabled automation, which can offer time-saving
features like auto-enforced travel policies that simplify compliance, instant
approvals of in-policy spending, and the auto-population of receipts.

A strong motivation for this pursuit of automated compliance is accounting
automation. When compliance is automated through auto-enforcement of policies,
automated receipts, etc., accounting teams have everything they need to close
the books quickly and cleanly.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

OUR RECOMMENDATIONS FOR ADAPTING TO A NEW ERA OF BUSINESS TRAVEL.


Companies are actively trying to rein in travel expenses without cutting back on
important and business-critical trips and group events. And in a world of
advancing spend management technology and T&E software, leaders shouldn’t be
forced to decide between costs and collaboration.

Based on the data we gathered, these are the five overarching considerations and
recommendations we compiled as you aim to increase the ROI of your travel
program:


 * Evaluate the readiness of your travel policies and processes to empower
   employees to make the right decisions depending on their trip. For example, a
   generous or flexible travel policy may make sense for a sales executive going
   to close a new client that will drive revenue; a slightly stricter policy may
   be preferable for a team-building employee offsite that will have less
   obvious ROI.

 * Keep travel in check with user-friendly, AI-powered automation and controls
   that can help you automate T&E policy compliance, manage an influx in travel
   requests and approvals efficiently, and uphold duty of care.

 * Assess your T&E solution's ability to manage the pre-trip approval process
   and enforce policy compliance, especially in the context of rising interest
   in group events and executive travel. Modern T&E solutions can help you
   manage an influx in travel requests and auto-enforce policies at the time of
   booking.

 * Invest in event management capabilities that can help them plan, manage, and
   track group events like company offsite and related spend from a single
   centralized system. Tracking event details, RSVPs, and attendees through a
   T&E solution can help prevent overspending.

 * Address duty of care implications that are omnipresent in distributed
   workforces. Access to the real-time location of travelers can assist you in
   assessing risk, tracking, and communicating with travelers no matter where
   they are.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

NEXT STEPS TO AUTOMATE TRAVEL AND EXPENSE CONTROLS AND IMPROVE TRAVEL ROI.


Organizations should look for AI-powered travel and expense solutions that make
it easy to automate T&E cost controls and detect savings opportunities rather
than require manual expense reviews and cost-cutting measures, which are highly
tedious for employees, managers, and finance teams — and easy for employees to
circumvent.

Travel solutions that are integrated with card and expense management software
may allow companies to consolidate SaaS costs and embed their policies during
travel booking, so employees will only see travel options that meet established
rules. It’s the easiest way to control air, hotel, and transit costs and can
lead to major savings.

Lastly, it’s important for companies to get a solution that gives them real-time
visibility into how actual travel spending compares to budgets, and that
provides AI-driven insights and alerts such as automatically detecting and
flagging expense anomalies, concerning patterns, fraud indicators, or increases
in MoM. This allows them to take swift action and ensure that travel dollars are
delivering strong ROI and going to the most impactful purposes.


 * Evaluate the readiness of your travel policies and processes to empower
   employees to make the right decisions depending on their trip. For example, a
   generous or flexible travel policy may make sense for a sales executive going
   to close a new client that will drive revenue; a slightly stricter policy may
   be preferable for a team-building employee offsite that will have less
   obvious ROI.

 * Keep travel in check with user-friendly, AI-powered automation and controls
   that can help you automate T&E policy compliance, manage an influx in travel
   requests and approvals efficiently, and uphold duty of care.

 * Assess your T&E solution's ability to manage the pre-trip approval process
   and enforce policy compliance, especially in the context of rising interest
   in group events and executive travel. Modern T&E solutions can help you
   manage an influx in travel requests and auto-enforce policies at the time of
   booking.

 * Invest in event management capabilities that can help them plan, manage, and
   track group events like company offsite and related spend from a single
   centralized system. Tracking event details, RSVPs, and attendees through a
   T&E solution can help prevent overspending.

 * Address duty of care implications that are omnipresent in distributed
   workforces. Access to the real-time location of travelers can assist you in
   assessing risk, tracking, and communicating with travelers no matter where
   they are.


GET OUR E-BOOK TO SEE HOW EXECS PLAN TO ADAPT TO A NEW TRAVEL ERA.





GET OUR E-BOOK TO SEE HOW EXECS PLAN TO ADAPT TO A NEW TRAVEL ERA.





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