For many companies, business travel is a necessity, but an expensive one. Even though it’s something a lot of organisations need to do, it can be very easy to let these expenses add up. Without the right guidelines and practices in place, business travel can prove to be a costly exercise, and one that can affect your business’s bottom line.
If you’re wondering how you can save money on business travel, here are some top tips:
Book Trips in Advance
One of the biggest problems with business travel is a lot of trips are booked last minute. This means you have to pay premium prices for the last few tickets an airline has, which can more than double the price you would have paid if you had booked a few weeks before.
If you can, start searching for flights, train tickets and hotel deals several months in advance, as this will save you a lot of money. To do this, it’s worth reminding your employees of the importance of doing this.
Alternatively, there are also companies like Statesman Travel who can arrange all of this for you, saving you a lot of time and money in the process.
Create a Business Travel Policy
If you have a business travel policy in your workplace – great! If you don’t, you could be leaving yourself wide open to haphazard bookings that cost the company a fortune.
By reinforcing your travel policies, employees will know what they can and cannot book. However, try not to be too strict with these, as all business travel policies need to have some flexibility to suit your business and the last-minute nature of some corporate trips.
Incentivise Your Employees
You’ve probably emphasised how important it is to book cheap tickets when travelling for business, but this might have fallen on deaf ears. Therefore, to make sure your employees are adhering to this mantra, you might want to add an incentive.
Consider the ways you could reward them for saving money on their travels, whether they get vouchers, bonuses or a few extra days of annual leave – or even organising a trip for them with the help of one of the incentive travel companies uk like Unique World Global. Consider what’s right for your business and employees, but by adding this incentive to their travel scheme, they’ll be much more likely to look for fair prices when they’re booking their trips. It’s also a great way to thank your employees for remaining focused on the business and the expenditure of business travel.
