Optimize your business travel policy and booking solutions with CTM’s online booking tool – Lightning

When booking business travel, do your employees’ practices prioritize savings, efficiency, and safety? Or is your business seeking ways to improve compliance with your existing travel policy to increase budget control, streamline supplier selection for better negotiation power, and increase visibility over your travelling workforce to improve duty of care?

Implementing a corporate travel online booking tool (OBT) is a vital step toward achieving policy compliance, savings, efficiency and safety for your travelling workforce.

Corporate Travel Management’s (CTM’s) Lightning OBT addresses these challenges by seamlessly integrating your business’s preferred suppliers, travel policy, and compliance requirements by user type and team, directly into a single, seamless travel booking channel. It’s time to say goodbye to the discretionary flight and hotel upgrades that strain your budget and welcome streamlined bookings, smooth approval workflows, and comprehensive visibility of your budget and travelling workforce. In this blog, we’ll show you how.

All-in-one booking for speed, efficiency and budget visibility

Booking all your travel, including flights, hotels, car rental and rail, in one central booking platform offers exceptional speed and efficiency for employees, full itinerary visibility for managers and supports greater compliance with preferred supplier contracts to maximize your budget. With integrated content from multiple sources, including GDS, low-cost carriers and last-minute hotel inventory, your team can view, compare and book the widest selection of content at the best rates in one place, eliminating the need to spend time comparing products across multiple websites.

Recognizing the unique needs of each business and workforce, CTM’s Lightning offers unparalleled flexibility. Travel options can be customized to ensure your preferred suppliers and negotiated rates are prioritized in the search results to encourage the best booking practices that maximize your travel budget.

By centralizing your business’s travel bookings, Lightning enables businesses to deliver effective travel policies that support your employees and your business to perform.

Enhanced control over your travel budget

Lightning empowers businesses to exercise greater control over the travel budget by offering real-time visibility and comprehensive reporting on air, hotel, and car rental (and rail) expenditure all in one place. Lightning’s configurable supplier preferencing tools encourage Travel Bookers to opt for the most cost-effective travel options based on factors such as traveler role type and purpose of travel to maximize budget control.

The platform’s ability to swiftly flag instances of out-of-policy bookings serves as a powerful tool to highlight and minimize missed savings opportunities, fostering a sense of accountability within your team. Policy compliance reporting provides visibility of reasons for policy breakage to help identify training needs and inform future enhancements to your business travel policy and supplier contracts. For example, Lightning’s booking reports may reveal patterns where travelers prioritize environmental sustainability features in their travel choices, or an airline’s on-time performance, or a hotel’s star rating or location to support traveler efficiency and safety.

Mitigate traveler risk

Duty of care and the health and wellbeing of travelers is a paramount focus for many businesses. Maintaining visibility of your employees’ whereabouts during business travel, understanding their travel patterns and preferences, and making informed supplier choices are critical to mitigating the risks associated with unexpected events, traveler burnout and policy non-compliance.

Lightning supports businesses to mitigate these risks. Lightning’s integrated approval workflows quickly identify out-of-policy bookings and bookings that meet specified risk thresholds, prompting the Travel Booker to seek approval before confirming the travel itinerary.

Lightning’s integrated itinerary tracking enables managers to locate and communicate with travelers when unexpected risks occur. And, Lightning’s real-time data capture provides actionable insights to address risk concerns and trends that may impact traveler wellbeing.

Control business travel policy adoption for decentralized workforces

With more workforces operating in hybrid and remote environments, the adoption of formal business processes and procedures is more important than ever. How you manage your business travel bookings is no different. Utilizing a corporate travel booking platform like Lightning has never been easier or more important to achieving stronger adherence to your business travel policy, no matter where your employees are located. And with Lightning’s mobile travel app, your team can manage their itinerary on the move, no matter where their travel takes them.

It’s time to drive travel policy compliance

From enforcing budgets by role type or department, to integrating approval workflows and tailoring policies based on travel purpose, Lightning empowers every business to better control their travel bookings to deliver on strategic objectives.

Is your business’s existing travel booking process and policy delivering inefficiencies, lost savings, and duty of care challenges? With CTM’s Lightning, you can significantly increase travel policy compliance, enhance control over travel spend, and mitigate risks associated with out-of-policy bookings to drive better outcomes for your business and employees.

It’s time to make the switch to Lightning today.