Travel management solution is used to plan, organize, book, tracking business/ official trips. After that analyze the business trips. It’s crucial to make sure that the travel management system that you choose has the features that your business needs. It is needed to get the travel expenses consolidated. To check how much expenses are made and also, to control the expenses if any surplus is done.

What is a Travel Management System?

Travel Management System is an end-to-end complete software solution which helps the end-users or travel agents to manage service providers, bookings, pricing, tracking, analyzing the inventory, etc. This travel management solution may include all the travel branches like Hotel, Car, Bus, Rail, Air, individual, or group tourist package.

A recent study from Oxford Economics revealed that for every $1 spent on business travel, companies gained $12.50 in incremental revenue. Eliminating business travel would cause a company to forfeit 17% of its profits in the first year alone. 28% of current business might be lost without in-person meetings.

Why Do You Need A Travel Management System?

Using a travel management system, allows you to keep better track of team members, and keep personal data in one secure place. It also means that company or personal credit cards are not compromised with online bookings.

What Are the Benefits of a Travel Management System?

A major benefit of travel management is the ability to reduce costs associated with travel. This can include everything from airline tickets, to hotel room rates and travel insurance. Generally, travel management specialists will have industry contacts and enough experience to find or negotiate the best deals.

• You can auto-allocate leads to concerned team members.
• You can integrate third-party telephony integrations directly into your CRM Dashboard.
• You can tag incoming leads as Hot/ Warm cold helping you focus on converting the hottest ones first.
• You can pull calls and emails generated from your billboards directly into your inbox.
• Each time a lead is generated a customer account gets auto-created and if it’s an existing lead then the old account gets updated.

What Are The Important Features Of a Travel Management System?

When you are comparing travel management systems, it’s important to understand which features are the most impactful. Here are the features of travel management systems which can help you manage travel safely, efficiently, and cost-effectively

1. Customizable Travel Policies

The most important feature of a travel management system is the travel policy. When office managers or travel managers book on behalf of travellers, you would need in-app travel policies to keep administrators on the same page. The management system should allow you to preset your travel policy so that it’s live and working whenever anyone books a trip. It is just a boring document, you have it right there in your booking app, where it matters most. 

2. Customizable Approval Workflows

It should include approval workflows inside of the platform so that if anything falls outside of policy, the person booking a trip can request approval and save their trip details. It should allow us to set up these approval workflows such as picking different approvers for different teams and customizing the level of strictness. The approval is required for all trips or just trips that fall out of policy or just trips booked by certain travellers.

3. Extensive inventory 

If it is a system that lacks low-priced accommodation and flight carriers, then one will be missing out on big cost-savings opportunities. The millennials actually tend to book budget options, It would be wise to make these available to them. 

4. Support At No Additional Cost

The management system should include support at no additional cost. This way, one would know what they are paying for and there are no surprises at the end of the month. This will help travellers to get the support they need when they need it without worrying about upsetting anyone in finance for a bunch of support calls.

5. No Redirects 

When you are booking a vacation and you get redirected, it’s annoying. The redirects are not only obnoxious, they make tracking your business travel all but impossible. At the end of the month, you’ll be scouring the web trying to collect all your invoices. Avoid this at all costs. 

6. Travel Spending Reporting

The most important feature is the ability to report on business travel. Here are some things you’ll want to be able to track:

• Travel spend by time period
• Travel spend by department or team
• Amount of travel spend booked out of policy
• Travel spend by project or client or event
• Amount of travel spent for hiring

7. Consolidated Invoicing

The easiest way to track your business travel is to book it in one place. However, some systems don’t act as a single vendor, one would need a lot of different invoices. To save time and hassle on business travel, choose a system that consolidates all of your monthly travel into a single vendor invoice.

8. Status Of All Trips In One Place

The whole point is being able to consolidate travel, which allows one to log in to the travel management platform to check the following:

• Who has successfully booked their trip within the policy?
• Who is requesting an out-of-policy booking and why
• Who has an in-progress trip (they’ve saved an itinerary but have not completed the booking yet)
• Who hasn’t booked a trip

When you are in charge of booking travel, you need to know what is going on with an instant overview to discover which travellers need extra help.

Customized Travel Management System

Systrix has experience developing an avant-garde, customized Travel Management System. We are a travel software solution provider in the Middle East region, which streamline the travel business and enhance productivity by providing travel IT solutions. Click here for more information.