Ideal corporate travel at any level is relatively simple: comfort, precision, and incredibly effective face-to-face negotiations and meetings. In practice, achieving this ideal requires experience, planning, and connections. With a great corporate travel team on your side, you can make sure that your corporate travel runs smoothly and efficiently. A travel management firm can help you avoid these potential pitfalls that can become travel nightmares.

Last-Minute Bookings

When organizations decide immediately before a trip that more people should attend a meeting, the prices on flights and hotel rooms can often skyrocket. While it may seem smooth to those attending who are given a flight number and room key, the bottom line hurts every time these bookings happen.

While some down-to-the-wire bookings will always happen, they are drastically reduced through careful planning in the two or three weeks preceding a meeting that requires air travel for some participants. Excellent organization and clear communication between meeting organizers and the corporate travel managers ensure that enough rooms and tickets are booked without waiting until the expensive 7-day window right before a meeting. When the last-minute booking cannot be helped, working with a Corporate Travel Management professional ensures that you benefit from their access to the best possible deals on the right kind of flights and rooms.

Lack of Insurance and Cancellation Protection

When trip plans are altered last minute, or a room reservation is lost, many corporate travelers wish that they had a cancellation insurance policy with them. In the case of rental car damage or corporate property loss, such as stolen computers, the company suffers the brunt of the cost if no one has ensured that there is enough liability insurance available to handle the situation.

Travel insurance and protection chosen by your travel management team will always be worth the cost because they research the offerings of your other corporate insurance policies. A travel specialist knows to check and make sure that you neither pay for unnecessary overlapping coverage nor scrimp on a few dollars of coverage and end up with significant losses in the event of an emergency.

Unclear Policies Lead to Violations and Overspending

Business travelers often want to project confidence and wealth during negotiations and meetings, resulting in some extravagant purchases on the corporate credit card. At times, these are well within the budget allocated for impressing clients and potential partners, but at other times, they directly violate the business expense policy. If, however, it is revealed that the travelers never knew what the corporate travel policies were related to expense accounts, it can be hard to enforce the policy and rein in the spending culture of corporate travel.

By creating a clear policy of when expense account spending is appropriate and when it isn't, including price ranges for items that are expected, the entire company begins to rally around a culture of shared goals and understood limits.

Making sure that corporate travelers understand their leeway and never attempt to expense something that is out of the question can save your company untold amounts of money and get employees on board with a policy of fiscal responsibility. Corporate travel management can help construct a sound travel policy for your company. After you collaborate on this policy, corporate travel managers advise your employees on reasonable expenses when necessary, providing insight and suggestions. Having knowledgeable professionals standing by can help your corporate travelers to request information and receive answers just in time.

A Teammate Left Behind

Group travel can easily result in a team member getting left alone or delayed when the rest of the team has arrived. As a result, meetings may have to be delayed, causing a cascade of travel changes. It can also create a disorganized impression on potential clients who expected to see a complete team.

An organized corporate travel team prevents disorganization and mitigates any unforeseeable travel changes. They make sure that communication is constant, ensuring that any change that can reunite the team will be made as soon as possible. They also acquire group deals on flights and hotel bookings that keep groups together along their journey and reduce the chance of separation in the first place.

Erratic Bookings Lose Out on Corporate Rewards Bonuses

Many credit card companies, hotel chains, and airlines offer substantial rewards to their biggest customers. At the same time, when corporate policies allow travelers to choose any of a variety of vendors for their travel needs, there are often savings that get missed. Reimbursement is time-consuming, and invoices cost time and money to fill, so a disorganized system of choices means that the company misses out on many major perks.

While many companies choose to let their employees who travel keep "points" on the travel they do, another option is to work with preferred vendors who give specialty prices, perks like airport lounges, and better room upgrades to those who bring them a lot of business. These benefits accrue while also taking the guesswork out of the quality of a new and unknown brand that an employee might select.

If this switch concerns employees, consider passing on the part of the savings in the form of a traveler bonus each year so that they can see just how much they get by working with preferred vendors for lodging and flights. A corporate travel management team selects preferred vendors so that your business receives many benefits from choosing those vendors.

Unsure and Stranded Travelers Are Potential Targets for Thieves

While traveling abroad and in unfamiliar situations, even the most self-assured employee can become disoriented if their car service is late or a flight is canceled. Depending on the location, a lost and frustrated traveler can be a potential target for pickpockets and thieves, adding additional expenses and hardship to an already tricky traveling experience.

Avoiding this scenario, and many similar nightmares are possible through excellent communication channels between your corporate travel professionals and the travelers themselves. These professionals work to achieve the goal of reuniting passengers as quickly as possible using their expert problem-solving skills.

The professionalism of a corporate travel team turns potential travel nightmares into travel success stories. Even in the case of unavoidable rescheduling, having dedicated Corporate Travel Management professionals on standby cuts the risk of experiencing any loss of clients, revenue, or productivity.