How to Scale Your Corporate Travel Solution While Meeting Employee Needs

Part of being a successful travel manager or finance leader is being flexible and growing as your role does. The same goes for your corporate travel solution as your organization seeks to expand and overcome challenges.

But many organizations feel throttled back by their technology, with 53% of travel and expense decision-makers saying the inability to scale and adapt T&E solutions has had major business consequences. It’s little wonder 78% want a single platform to handle both travel and expense.¹

A corporate travel solution should work everywhere you work – and everywhere you plan to grow. As your organization aims to evolve its business travel solutions and corporate travel program, it’s valuable to realize the power of listening to employees. As end users, travelers have plenty to say about flexibility, solutions, safety, and a whole lot more.

To transform your organization’s travel and tools, we’ll explore ways to:

• Prepare your business and travel program to grow by assessing processes and solutions and using best practices for expansion.
• Listen to and be guided by the employees who hit the road and endure the challenges of business travel while trying to build success for the company and their careers.
• Engage with the Millennial and Gen Z travelers who make up a significant part of the workforce and have clear preferences and views that should not be ignored.

Ensure your business – and corporate travel solution – are ready for growth

Businesses and travel managers are always confronting something new, whether it’s regions and regulations or traveler preferences and types of spending. When assessing current business travel solutions – or considering new ones – it’s critical to understand the challenges of expanding their use as well as best practices for your corporate travel program’s successful expansion.

Prepare for the challenges and risks of expansion

Tools and processes must be able to evolve with the organization. Organizations moving into new markets and countries should look at the evolution as an opportunity to replace the outdated and develop better ways of doing business.

Key steps to take:

• Scrutinize processes and systems. The inefficiency of current processes can become more apparent at scale, consume resources, and frustrate those involved in travel. Determine whether yours are sufficient or whether it’s time to scrap and retool instead of continuing what worked in the past.
• Be ready for increased risk. With new territories come new regulations for taxes and other areas that can be difficult to handle – and bring fines if you can’t keep up. Keeping data safe becomes more challenging as operations – and bad actors – grow. It may sound obvious that each new country brings different cultures, laws, and potential for disruptions, but organizations must understand them within the context of their business and be ready to respond.
• Improve visibility into spend. If current solutions and processes are disjointed, travel managers likely lack a clear view of spending with suppliers and the ability to negotiate better deals. The finance team, too, might not have accurate numbers, which means they can’t optimize cash flow.

Best practices to ensure a successful corporate travel program expansion

With an understanding of the pitfalls, you can take a more strategic approach as you put flexible, scalable travel solutions in place.

• Look at current and expected locations to determine similarities, what systems are in use and where, which generate the most travel and expenses, and other factors. It’s information that can guide your choices.
   
• Understand the user experience by studying policies and processes and whether they’re region-specific and by examining the most common travel and payment methods.
   
• Assess existing T&E solutions to nail down whether they accommodate different languages and currencies, readily add teams and offices, use artificial intelligence (AI) to improve analysis and employee experience, and truly integrate with ERPs and other systems.
   
• Create a global model so your corporate travel program and its teams, policies, and process are aligned no matter where business is done. The model should include expense types, workflows, reporting requirements, audit rules, benchmarks, and customization guidelines.
   
• Devise your deployment by setting out the most sensible way to roll out solutions region by region, guided by commonalities such as currency, customs, language, and other factors.
   
• Listen to your people, making certain that local leadership has bought into a travel transition and that the right stakeholders are involved. Consider cultural differences, what user support will look like, and the many ways new regions might be different. In other words, listen closely to the people who know.

What does your workforce want in a corporate travel program? Ask them.

Travelers want to be heard, whether it’s having easy avenues to share feedback or observing that their concerns are actually addressed. So listening is critical to the success of your corporate travel program.

Frequent fliers are not monolithic. Their concerns are as varied as their roles and the products their organizations provide. But it’s safe to say they want to be kept safe, desire flexibility and choices that work for them, and don’t want travel to strain their personal lives.

“It's key to listen to your travelers and to take their feedback into consideration at all levels, and as we move forward in the travel space, we’re going to have to figure out how to embrace that but also be able to guide them to do the right thing and make the best choice for the business,” Angela Arntz, global travel director at Unisys, says in a recent video featuring SAP Concur travel and expense management customers. 

It’s not a leap to say travelers and other employees are under stress, as research bears out:

• 57% think burnout won’t get better unless their company makes big changes.²
• 41% believe their organization would prioritize making more money over retaining workers.³
• 91% of business travelers say requests for flexibility were rejected in the past year.⁴

From requesting approval for a trip to booking flights and lodging, today’s travel management systems offer ways to ease the burden. Improving workforce mental health requires doing more than just allowing business class on occasion; there are multiple ways to ensure you’re supporting traveler well-being, such as:

• Weigh not just the costs and compliance of your travel management system but also how employees react to room rate limits, mileage reimbursement, airfare classes, and so on.
• Recognize that little things matter a lot, like the ability to pay for extra legroom, access to airline lounges, easy connections to loyalty accounts, and having a solution with New Distribution Capability (NDC) for access to more options.
• Use corporate cards to make life simpler for travelers because they automatically capture transactions, minimize receipts, and don’t leave your people on the hook for expenses.

Whether you conduct surveys, institute feedback sessions, or create other ways to gather input, be guided by a central tenet: Don’t make assumptions about what travelers want. Let them tell you.

Employee Travel and Expense 2.0: New Realities, New Solutions

Organizations need sophisticated approaches to travel and expense management that strike a careful balance between organizational and employee needs — and tackle business travel 2.0. It’s going to take a strategic approach to address employee needs for flexibility and equal opportunity, manage travel and expense in this complex landscape of business travel, and stay strategically aligned with business goals at the same time.  

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Leveraging your corporate travel solution to meet the needs of Millennial and Gen Z travelers

A big and growing part of your workforce – Millennial and Gen Z employees – have clear views and strong preferences about corporate travel programs and policies and what does and doesn’t work for them.

To successfully listen and engage with workers of these generations requires recognizing that they come from a broad range of backgrounds and perspectives and can’t be treated as a singular persona.

With the “don’t lump them all together” caveat, Millennials and Gen Zers often appreciate:

• Knowing why T&E policies are in place and how they connect to the goals of the corporate travel program and the business overall.
• Receiving information in writing or in person instead of one-off emails.
• The social component of travel – seeing customers face to face, the opportunity to build rapport with co-workers – even more than the financial rewards it may bring.
• Technology that is simplified  and just works, as that’s more valuable than chasing the latest tech of the month. And despite their fluidity with technology, they still need support, whether coming from in-app guidance or an actual human being.

“The 20-year-olds and the 30-year-olds … are so used to being on their devices and being able to click a few buttons and do what needs to be done,” says Arntz of Unisys. “So I'm thinking about the future and how I can shape our program to embrace NDC and take that generation into consideration.”

Conclusion

Transforming your corporate travel program takes a combination of the right corporate travel solution, the right strategy, and treating people right.

With that mix, businesses can stay ahead of challenges today and in the future. In the process, they can meet the needs of employees critical to their success in current markets and new ones as well.

Scalability and flexibility can go hand in hand, accompanied by the recognition that most employees want to make the right choices, and that communication should be a two-way street.

“People are always going to want to do their own thing,” says Gemma Cannings, NYU’s AVP of Procurement & Payables, in the SAP Concur customer video. “Sometimes these behaviors are for good reason, and we must make sure we listen and understand why they're making these choices. And then think about, ‘Do we have to make a change to policy, or do we have to make a change the way we're doing things?’”