Features to look for when choosing a travel management company
- Extensive travel inventories: It’s essential that the travel management company you choose gives you access to comprehensive inventories of transportation and accommodation providers, as well as enabling you to compare prices, dates, and offers that best suit your travel needs.
- Built-in approval workflows: Embedding your travel approval workflows and travel policy into your travel management company’s platform helps you increase policy compliance rates and eliminates the need to manage travel and expenses via long email threads.
- Centralized invoice collection: Some travel management companies don’t act as a single vendor meaning that you’ll still need to collect and collate invoices from accommodation providers, car rental companies, and airlines. Travel management companies that offer a system that consolidates all of your monthly invoices into one single vendor invoice can save you a lot of time and hassle.
- Flexible booking options: Flexible booking options enable businesses to accommodate any last-minute changes to itineraries, trip dates or cancelations after booking for free or at a reasonable cost.
- 24/7/365 Customer support: Unexpected events are inevitable in business travel, and you need to know that your travel management company will be there to help you should things go wrong. A prompt, easy-to-access customer support function is essential to help your travelers manage any issues that arise.
- Reporting capabilities: The ability to access travel data that is broken down by individual business travelers, mode of transportation, booking type, cancellations, and recoverable VAT helps you carry out significant spend optimization activities.
The 4 best corporate travel management companies for businesses based in Ottawa
1. TravelPerk
- Flexible booking options with FlexiPerk: TravelPerk’s FlexiPerk solution lets you and your employees cancel up to two hours before departure, in turn receiving a minimum refund of 80% of your travel cost back in TravelPerk credit.
- 24/7 fast customer support: Our team’s target 15-second response time takes the stress out of travel so your employees can get back to their trip. Get real assistance in real-time, by a real human - no robots here!
- Safety alerts with TravelCare: Keep traveling employees safe while accessing the latest travel alerts and restrictions at your fingertips with TravelCare. TravelCare provides up-to-date information on advisories, changes and disruptions, granting you and your employees peace of mind their safety is top priority.
- Integrated travel policy & approval flows: Integrate your existing travel policies, or set up new policies in under two minutes. The choice is yours with TravelPerk’s integrated policies and approval workflows. Our built-in travel policies help you achieve policy compliance, while still giving employees the freedom to book their own travel.
- Centralized invoicing: Keep on top of all your business travel expenses using our centralized invoicing system.
- Easy & real time expense reports: TravelPerk’s real time expense tracking and reporting provides a succinct yet simple breakdown of travel data by employee, and booking type. It’s also easy to configure reports based on your travel needs and schedule.
- Carbon offsetting with GreenPerk: Achieve sustainable business travel this quarter with GreenPerk. Calculate your carbon footprint, and offset your carbon emissions in an affordable yet impactful way.
- Integration with 3rd party software: TravelPerk’s wide array of integrated partners equals a smooth and efficient onboarding process for your existing 3rd party software and integrations.
- Events Management: Give your next corporate event a leg up with TravelPerks’ event management solutions. From team kick-offs to offsite events, coordinating and planning your next company event is taken care of with a few simple clicks.
2. Direct Travel
- Program management: Offering travel management and travel planning services.
Cost-effective savings: Providing clients with directing reporting in travel analytics, and unused tickets reporting. - Traveler intelligence hub: Helping customers plan and pack for their next business trip with packing lists, safety tips, and requirements using Sherpa Intelligence.
- Risk management services: Travel alerts and trip briefings at your fingertips, alongside medical and evacuation services.
- Event management: Support for strategic meetings, employee engagement and recognition events, and sales incentives.
3. Centrum Travel
- Travel policy assistance: Guidance for travel managers looking to create travel policies suited to the needs of your company and its employees.
- Customized travel reporting: Highlighting areas for improvement, and finance tracking suited to your company’s accounting needs.
- Leisure travel bookings: Offering river cruises, all-inclusive vacations, and destination weddings for every travel experience.
- Designing approval processes: For class of travel, and number of hotel nights allowed per meeting.
- Customized employee profiles: Allowing travel managers to monitor and report on individual employee travel habits.
4. BCD Travel
- BCD pay: Travel and expense management platform for travel managers and financiers.
- Mobile alert system: For keeping your employees safe while working and traveling abroad.
- Cost-effective travel savings: Negotiating deals with suppliers and identifying last minute employee bookings.
- Duty of care: Assisting travel managers in building a fulsome duty of care policy, while providing up-to-date destination reports and automated risk alerts.
- Trip Authorization Tool: Allowing for multichannel bookings, and configurations based on your company travel policy.