Planning business travel for your company’s first time, or are you a seasoned pro at organizing trips? Either way, understanding business travel types, overcoming obstacles, key considerations, and the benefits of partnering with a specialist corporate travel agency like DW Travel will make everything smoother and more convenient.
Business trips enable staff to connect with colleagues and customers, and finalize important deals; however, managing all the logistics can become complicated – particularly when you factor in emergency visa applications, flight cancellations, and unexpected expenses.
What is corporate travel?
Corporate travel means company employees journeying for professional purposes; this might involve meeting customers, finalizing contracts, or attending industry conferences.
The booking process involves organizing flights, hotels, and transportation, while also ensuring proper documentation for international entry is obtained, and preparing your staff for their journey.
The different types of corporate business travel
Business travel needs arise in various situations, and we’ve outlined several common scenarios below.
Conferences and events
Staff may need to attend industry conferences for professional development, or participate in networking opportunities to expand business contacts. Trade shows also represent crucial corporate travel occasions, providing employees valuable direct interaction with potential customers, ultimately driving company revenue growth.
Client meetings
Employees might travel for external purposes, including client consultations. Many countries and cultures worldwide, particularly Japan and across Asia, place high importance on in-person meetings, making them essential for establishing and sustaining relationships, or securing contracts.
Bleisure travel
Many staff members find great value in merging business trips with personal leisure, allowing them downtime to discover new locations – creating the concept of ‘bleisure‘. Companies benefit too, since employees can decompress and rejuvenate during this period, returning to work feeling refreshed.
With bleisure bookings, typically the company covers round-trip transport and lodging for business days, while employees pay for additional hotel nights, though this depends on your organization’s guidelines.
Internal travel
Companies with global offices often require employees to visit other locations for colleague meetings – whether for face-to-face discussions, or to understand new procedures or workplace culture that another office has successfully adopted.
Similarly, company retreats serve as another catalyst for international travel, bringing everyone together in one location, where they spend several days participating in various team-building activities and strengthening relationships.
Office transfers
International offices frequently involve employee relocations – ranging from permanent moves to new countries, to temporary assignments, perhaps for specific projects, or establishing new locations.
Office transfers represent more complex corporate travel scenarios, requiring investigation and acquisition of appropriate visas and documentation enabling your staff legal work authorization in the destination country; plus providing settlement assistance, including accommodation sourcing.
Things to consider when booking corporate travel
Beyond the challenges, numerous logistical elements require attention when arranging business travel, ensuring seamless execution – explaining why many organizations choose corporate travel specialists like us to eliminate the complications.
Obtain all necessary information
For smooth travel experiences, verify that employee passports remain valid, and secure all required international visas, enabling entry to their destination countries.
Additionally, collect emergency contact information, dietary requirements for catering to their needs abroad; plus home addresses for organizing pick-up/drop-off transport, and planning efficient routes when multiple travelers are involved.
Book accommodation and flights in advance
Advance booking typically secures optimal pricing – though corporate travel doesn’t always permit this, with some arrangements finalized at short notice.
For accommodation selection, cost isn’t the sole consideration. Venue proximity plays a crucial role, alongside public transport availability, and neighborhood safety.
Also evaluate facilities including breakfast service, arranging alternatives if unavailable; meeting rooms (when necessary), and desirable extras like fitness centers, spas, and pools for employees staying multiple nights.
Before confirming, review feedback, filtering specifically for business traveler reviews when available, to gain the most accurate hotel assessment.
The challenges of booking corporate travel yourself
Business travel arrangements involve numerous components, creating potential obstacles along the way. Nevertheless, preparation and process understanding help minimize these challenges.
Managing costs
Corporate travel requires budgets encompassing everything – flights and accommodation, plus transportation and meals.
Even carefully planned budgets prove challenging to maintain – particularly when employees select their own hotels, or last-minute changes prevent refunds. Ultimately, you’re responsible for budget adherence, while preparing for every contingency.
Getting approval
Beyond obtaining financial and HR budget approvals, you’ll require traveling employees to confirm their satisfaction with itineraries, and address any questions.
While sometimes straightforward; other times, you may encounter resistance – situations that business travel management companies can handle on your behalf.
Not having a clear process
Without established procedures, situations quickly become chaotic! Allowing employees to find their own accommodation risks exceeding budgets, or delayed responses, forcing last-minute arrangements.
Likewise, without dedicated booking systems for employee requests, you might receive communications through various channels from different staff members, making oversights more likely.
If you haven’t already, establish comprehensive booking procedures that you – or new team members – can easily implement by following written guidelines. Share this plan with employees so they understand who to contact, and how to request travel when necessary, significantly simplifying your workflow.
Regular travel updates
Flight schedules may change, venues might switch, or countries’ political situations evolve rapidly; as the corporate travel coordinator, you’ll need to monitor all developments, and provide consistent travel updates to everyone involved, which becomes extremely time-intensive; potentially causing last-minute plan modifications.
How to improve your corporate travel
Having covered the essential considerations for business travel booking, we’ve compiled additional steps you can implement (or we can assist with), that will genuinely enhance your employee(s) overseas experience, ensuring an excellent trip.
Brief employees before they fly
For comprehensive preparation, we recommend scheduling discussions with employee(s) to review travel arrangements, and allow them to ask questions. Given that certain countries require specific arrival documents, this provides an ideal opportunity to remind employees which documents they need accessible during travel, ensuring smooth experiences.
Research your destination
After confirming accommodation, and before employee departure, researching their destination helps them feel significantly more prepared. Investigate weather predictions, destination safety (considering crime statistics, and political climate), nearest public transport access, and healthcare facilities should illness occur. Essentially, you’ll want comprehensive preparation for worst-case scenarios!
Nevertheless, there’s plenty of enjoyable research too, including restaurants and bars close to the hotel, plus must-see attractions, and activities for their leisure time.
Give employees an itinerary
After completing research, and finalizing bookings, compile comprehensive itineraries detailing everything daily, and supply travelers with both printed versions, plus digital copies, should they misplace the physical document.
In your itinerary you’ll want to cover:
- Transfer to the airport: This includes pick-up times, and where they’ll be picked up from.
- Flight times: This includes the take-off time, any layovers, and relevant flight code(s).
- Transfer on arrival at their destination: Where they’ll be met, the number plate of the car, and the driver’s name and contact details, if you have them to hand.
- Accommodation: This includes the address, check in/out times, contact details, whether or not breakfast is served (and timings), and details of any extra amenities they have.
- Things to do: For whatever reason your employee(s) may be travelling, you may need to let them know what time they need to be at a venue, meeting times, travel times, where and when dinner has been booked, etc.
- Free time options: Adding in your research on the top things to do, lunch or restaurant spots, and more, will be a nice touch.
- Emergency contact details: Any names, phone numbers, and email addresses of people either in your office, and who they’re meeting will be really handy if timings are late, or if employees need something last minute when they’re out there.
Why use a business travel management company instead?
Truthfully, corporate travel coordination involves extensive requirements, prompting many organizations to engage services like DW Travel, handling the demanding work for them!
Some of the benefits of using a business travel management company include:
- 24/7 help: Hopefully, your employees’ time abroad will run smoothly, but there’s always a chance of something unexpected happening! Whether it’s a cancelled flight, or a quickly changing political situation that means employees need to leave, we’re only a phone call away. We’ll always be there for you and your colleagues, and our partnership with a dedicated risk management company means your employees will always be safe.
- Reduction of errors: With so many moving parts involved in booking corporate travel, it’s easy for something to be missed. However, working with a professional corporate travel management company like DW Travel means that errors will be minimised. Simply let us know your requirements, and we’ll take care of the rest!
- Help set a company travel policy: One of the main headaches of keeping corporate travel internal, is the need to set up a standardised policy. By using a management system, that’s automatically done for you, with one clear procedure for everyone in your company to follow.
- Manual work is reduced: Forget researching hotels closest to your chosen venue, working out pick-up times for transport, and confirming flight codes – the manual admin of corporate travel will be taken away from you with a corporate travel management company; freeing up your time to focus on other tasks.
- Tracking approvals process: With everything done online through one system, both you and your employees will easily be able to see where you’re at with approvals, and what needs chasing.
- Risk reduction: There are many risks to booking overseas travel at work, and it’s easy to overlook something. Partner with DW Travel, and we’ll not only ensure that all the visas and legal paperwork are taken care of for travel, but that risk assessments are conducted for the destination employees are visiting, alongside a review of your duty of care obligations, and so much more.
- Cost saving: We partner with the best in the business, which means that we’re able to enjoy significant savings on flights, accommodation, and more, which we pass on to you.
For more information about how DW Travel can help you with your corporate travel, please get in touch with us today; or for more travel tips, head on over to our blog.
