Travel management tips for leveraging expense data

The Global Business Travel Association (GBTA) predicts that global business travel spend will have made a full recovery by the end of 2024 totaling around $1.48 trillion. With many companies back to 2019 business travel volumes and also navigating a new workforce landscape, it is time to revisit how business travel expense is managed; identifying out-of-policy expenses and ensuring you can leverage that information to prevent exceptions in the future.

Expense data can be useful to understand employee behavior and why exceptions are occurring. It offers an opportunity to address those concerns and potentially alleviate traveler friction and/or increase policy compliance. Pre-ticketing information, available through CTM Data, allows you to monitor traveler bookings and capture policy exceptions before they occur.

Analyzing policy, exceptions, and expense data can help you adjust program parameters to mitigate out-of-policy requests at the point of sale and address points of traveler friction that impede travelers’ productivity and job performance.

Here are five ways Corporate Travel Management (CTM) works with our clients to leverage business travel expense data to drive travel policy development and program initiatives:

1. Capturing the right data

When was the last time you checked your enhanced data fields? Is your business capturing the right information to assist in your reconciliation processes? CTM can support with identifying and capturing the right booking information for your expense management tool to help streamline your reconciliation process, saving time and creating efficiencies across your business for the traveler and your financial team.

2. Hybrid workforces will call for a greater need for travel and expense control

With more employees working remotely or in a hybrid environment, CTM can help businesses to start thinking about the functionality of travel and expense management by setting up a travel policy for remote employees and having the right controls in place to automatically track expenses to prevent out of policy spend before it happens.

3. Align policy with user groups and reward road warriors

Are certain groups of travelers consistently expensing travel reservations that are out of policy for a due cause? We tailor policy levels to multiple user groups while also considering individual preferences. This allows you to set out-of-policy exceptions and alerts for general user groups, while still catering to your elite travelers, top producers, and executives.

4. Mitigate direct buying and leakage

We help our clients establish adoption campaigns, design supplier promotions, identify program ambassadors, and engage reluctant users directly. CTM can help you communicate with travelers through traditional and non-traditional channels directed at driving traveler choice and behavior. We apply policy and tailored messaging to our booking tools, mobile applications, gamification tools, scripting, direct traveler and agent communications and more.

We can also bundle the flight, car hire, and accommodation into a singular booking, with no additional costs. This enhances corporate duty of care by ensuring traveler movements can be monitored easily and effectively through one booking.

5. Providing technology to make informed decisions

In addition to our personalized service, CTM gives you the tools needed to quickly and efficiently identify possible cost savings in the purchasing and booking process, through predictive forecasting, behavior and trend analysis, and industry benchmarking. Furthermore, access to frequently updated pre-ticketing data allows you to capture and respond to policy breaches and reduce spend through improved policy compliance. This is all supported through a single, global reporting hub.

Is your TMC helping you leverage your business travel expense data into an actionable travel program strategy? If you are not leveraging your expense data into going forward travel policy strategies, you may risk advancing overall program goals, continued leakage, poor program visibility, and increased cost.