What are the main benefits of using a travel management company?
- Negotiating the best deals: Travel management companies can help you reduce the amount you spend by negotiating the best business travel rates on your behalf. They can also help you form long-term partnerships with airlines and hotels to help you cut travel costs moving forward.
- Detailed travel and expense reports: Optimising your travel budget based on previous trips is one of the best ways you can reduce business travel costs. Travel management companies provide detailed travel and expense reports to help you do just that. They also centralise all of your travel data in one place, giving you deeper insight into travel spend and travel programme performance.
- Save time with everything in one place: Modern corporate travel management companies allow you to centralise all business travel processes. They should provide you with a single user-friendly platform that lets you deal with everything from booking and travel policy compliance, to trip safety management and invoicing.
- Self-booking for added efficiency: Modern travel management platforms allow your employees to make their own travel arrangements. This means no more back-and-forth between you and multiple employees over what needs to be booked and why.
- Ensuring travel policy compliance: You put travel policies in place for a reason; to reduce costs, streamline processes, and keep employees safe. Inevitably though, employees often make arrangements that fall outside your travel policy. By using a travel management company you can stop this from happening, because their platform will flag or block any unauthorised bookings.
- Employee safety and satisfaction: If you want to keep your employees happy and free from harm while travelling, each trip needs to be managed efficiently, and carefully. Modern travel management companies offer extensive risk management, customer support, and even traveller tracking solutions to make this as easy as possible.
Features to look for when choosing a travel management company
- Extensive travel inventories: To consistently fulfil your business travel needs, a modern travel management platform should offer a wide range of travel and accommodation options. This should include the ability to book different modes of transportation, such as trains and rental cars.
- Flexibility: Cancellations and last-minute changes are unfortunately all too common in the business travel world, so choosing a travel management solution with flexible booking options is essential.
- Comprehensive customer support: If things go wrong on a business trip, you or the business traveller involved will need support from your travel management company. If you can’t easily get in touch with a real human 24/7 to deal with any issues that arise, the customer support they’re offering isn’t good enough.
- Centralised invoice collection: One of the main reasons for using a travel management company is to save time and streamline processes. So whatever solution you choose, it should consolidate all your monthly invoices into one single vendor invoice.
- Reporting/data capabilities: Detailed travel/expense reports, and intuitive data representation are essential for identifying and implementing spend optimisation activities. Modern travel management companies should always provide these features.
The 5 best corporate travel management companies in Scotland
1. TravelPerk
- Industry-leading travel inventory for flights and accommodation providers.
- Integrated travel policies and in-app approvals -- this includes approval workflows, and the ability to customise strictness level for each workflow.
- FlexiPerk, a cancellation policy that lets you cancel travel arrangements up to two hours before departure with a guaranteed refund of 80%.
- 24/7 customer support with real humans and a target 15-second response rate.
- TravelCare, a travel safety and risk management solution that provides safety alerts, and full visibility into all traveller locations and associated risks.
- Centralised invoicing for all business travel -- removing the need for invoice requests and reminders.
- Flexible, intuitive, real-time reporting covering every aspect of your business travel, including expenses, carbon emissions and more.
- Quick and painless VAT reclaim solution.
- Huge catalogue of integrations with 3rd party software.
- TravelPerk Events, an events management solution that covers everything from kick-offs and offsites to parties, enabling remote and hybrid teams to connect in real life.
- Carbon offsetting with GreenPerk -- to help incorporate environmental sustainability into your travel programme.
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See how TravelPerk makes business travel stress free
2. EQ Travel
- Flight, rail, hotel, apartment, and car reservations.
- Online booking platform with the ability to integrate travel policies.
- A 24-hour emergency contact staffed by the EQ team.
- Personalised travel management reports, including risk management reporting.
- Conference and events management.
- Incentive travel (trips rewarded to top performers in your company).
- Clinical trial travel.
- Ancillary services such as chauffeur hire, currency, ferries, passports and visas, airport parking, aircraft charter and private jet hire.
3. Stewart Travel Management
- Air, hotel, rail, ferry and car bookings.
- Global air ticketing platform that offers the best prices on over 900 airlines across more than 51 countries.
- Online booking portal with travel policy integration.
- 24-hour emergency assistance service.
- Dedicated account manager.
- Dedicated conference and event management team.
- Tailored management reporting, with post-trip travel data on demand.
- Flexible payment solutions (including credit terms).
- Traveller tracking -- Stewart Travel Management can instantly locate all travellers in a specific area and contact them by email or SMS message.
- Chauffeur service, visa/passport service, airport lounges, transfers and parking.
- Offshore and marine fares.
4. The Travel Company Edinburgh
- Air, hotel, rail, ferry and car hire.
- Account Management.
- Travel policy management (including suggestions on how to improve compliance.)
- Meetings, incentives, conferences, and event management.
- Traveller tracking -- with 24/7 emergency service.
- Multi-level, comprehensive management information available online, as well as specified periodic reports.
- Booking process evaluation.
- Cost savings through cost reduction planning and implementation.
- Monthly invoicing -- The Travel Company Edinburgh will pay for everything on your behalf and bill you once per month. They can also arrange bill backs for meals and additional hotel services so your employees don’t have to pay upfront and then claim expenses.
5. CTM
- All modes of transport covered.
- Dedicated strategic account manager.
- User-friendly online booking tool with built-in approval workflows and travel policy integration.
- Customer-centric travel technology, including a suite of interconnected travel tools.
- Events management.
- Localised after-hours emergency travel support.
- Traveller tracking.
- Industry-specific solutions -- for event travel, sports travel, and ERM (energy, resources, and marine) travel.
- Carbon reporting and offsetting.
- Traveller wellbeing reporting.
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