Organize your business trips
Business trips are often stressful for travellers because mishaps are common. To understand your employees’ distress, you need to be aware of the step-by-step process of business travel.
Solutions are available to guarantee employee satisfaction, help with management and simplify the business travel process.
Is managing business travel easy?
Business travel can be complicated for some employees – and for good reason! The extensive preparations for the trip, in addition to complications experienced while travelling, create a tense and anxious environment, and can lead to unease and/or a lack of employee productivity.
How is it managed?
Business travel must be well organised to ensure the success of an assignment. However, it is often difficult to get your bearings among the multitude of available options and increasingly complicated pricing terms. Preparing for a trip requires organisation and anticipation, as far as possible. Services must, of course, be chosen according to scheduling constraints, and be in line with the company travel policy.
Even before the trip takes place, the mere preparation for business travel is a potential cause of friction for business travellers. Providing a solution that combines the various types of services required (train, flight, hotel, hire car, taxi/chauffeured car) can reduce this headache, especially if the travel policy rules are pre-set and the option available is sufficient to meet all your needs.
Understanding travel
Business travel often starts with pre-transport; whether this is done on foot, in a personal vehicle, in a taxi or on public transport; it allows the employee to get from their home to the train station or airport. Sufficient time must therefore be allowed (including potential hiccups) to make sure they arrive on time for their train or flight.
Train journeys and flights themselves can also be subject to potential delays, so employees greatly appreciate being kept up to date by the company. Once on board, there’s no time to lounge around – they need to put the finishing touches to their upcoming meeting, sort/classify/purge their emails, etc.
On arrival: post-transport. What possible modes of transport are available to take them to the meeting? Are there traffic jams or bottlenecks at that time? What’s the weather like? In short, a whole bunch of questions that your employee might ask.
The meeting is going so well that it runs over a bit: it’s going to be difficult to catch the return train or flight. Again, what’s the traffic like? Is public transport crowded? Can they change their ticket? Themselves or via their travel agency? What time does the agency close?
Let’s suppose the employee caught their train/flight on time. They can then make a start on the minutes of their meeting, deal with the day’s emails, etc. before arriving home in time to prepare for the next day.
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Notilus – a partner for travel managers and their employees
How does Notilus help you in your everyday life as a travel manager or HR/travel department and that of your ‘traveller’ employees?
Our approach to simplifying the management of business travel is aimed not only at travellers (travel requests, booking, etc.) but all players in the process: managers (for approvals), even the finance department (budgetary control and monitoring, cost allocation, etc.) and especially the HR department and/or travel manager (for the company travel policy, traveller safety, employee well-being, etc.).
Our solution was designed so you don’t have to spend precious time managing business travel, but that’s not all. It was also designed to help you ensure compliance with your company travel policy and to ensure employee satisfaction before, during and after their trips.
Company travel policy and technology
How does the travel manager reconcile the company’s requirements and prerogatives with the needs of its employees?
Over time, the Internet and computer languages have come a long way, enabling the emergence of several players in both leisure and business travel, especially online travel agencies (OTAs such as Expedia, Orbitz, ouisncf, Kayak, etc.) and hotel comparison sites such as the giant Booking.com, Hotels.com, CDS, HRS and even HCorpo. Some start-ups have even become key players in the industry, such as Airbnb and Uber, and many other gems are beginning to emerge.
This is in addition to trends and changing practices: Bleisure, the fine line between business and leisure travel, and even open booking, often controversial because it is poorly understood and badly ‘managed’.
We move with the times and the travel manager has to deal with different generations of employees, some of whom are used to so-called traditional channels such as travel agencies and others who have grown up using smartphones. Emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence have enabled many developments, especially user-oriented ones, as the trends show.
Traveller safety and data security
Many companies have incorporated the concept of duty of care into their travel policy; it has become one of the number one priorities for companies in recent years.
The stress caused by business travel and the time spent preparing for it can be reduced firstly by defining and implementing a clear and explicit travel policy, and secondly by providing appropriate solutions that allow employees to prepare for their trips safely and with peace of mind.
However, the safety of your travellers and the security of their data must also be incorporated into your company travel policy. Companies are legally responsible for the safety of their employees during business travel.
If there are any problems, other than the harm suffered by the employee, the legal and financial repercussions can be catastrophic for the company.
Browse our articles dedicated entirely to managing your business travel
Go further...
In our "mobility management" approach, our Notilus solution is not limited to simplifying your travel request or reservation processing. Our credo is to simplify all the processes related to the external mobility of its employees, including the treatment of expense reports.
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