As businesses look to improve overall efficiencies and the cost-effectiveness of their travel programmes, we examine the role of travel booking solutions and virtual card payments in centralising corporate travel.
How do you manage corporate travel?
Historically, managing corporate travel has required several points of manual intervention from a business.
When it comes to making a booking, businesses need to choose who is responsible for this, whether that’s an internal resource, a dedicated travel management company, or the traveller themselves.
Here, employers must manage the delicate balance between control, ensuring all trips are compliant with internal policies, and employee expectations for independence and self-management, all whilst providing a duty of care.
When it comes to on-trip expenses, businesses have then traditionally had two choices. The first, to supply travellers with a corporate credit card that can be taken on the trip. The second, to encourage travellers to use their personal card and reclaim costs back at a later date.
Neither option is without its challenges. There’s a cost to distributing physical cards to travellers along with the increased risk of them being lost, stolen, or copied. Credit can also get tied up in cards that aren’t being utilised, by irregular travellers, for example.
On the other hand, employees in the UK are effectively lending their employers £321 million a month through expenses, leading to a feeling they are at times acting as a bank to their own employer.
For businesses, there is a duty of care and wellbeing for employees as well as a need to avoid cumbersome expense processes.
What is a corporate booking tool?
Corporate booking tools refers to a vast variety of solutions, all with their own unique benefits. However, all of these tools share a common aim, to improve the booking stage of the corporate travel process.
Different corporate booking tools look to address different, specific challenges that businesses may experience when booking travel by centralising the booking and management of corporate trips.
As a result, these tools offer a range of unique features such as real-time flight status updates, access to special corporate rates, automated expense reports, and integration with travel management companies.
How are booking systems used within corporate travel?
Booking systems are used to simplify the corporate travel experience, offer depth and breadth of content, and streamline administrative processes, such as payment.
Conferma’s virtual card payment gateway, when integrated with other corporate travel solutions, makes payment frictionless. Rather than manually entering payment details, businesses can create a virtual card almost instantly with one click which is fully compliant with internal travel policies and requirements.
Virtual card payment is a popular solution for corporate travel because it offers businesses enhanced control, seamless integration with existing platforms, and a centralised view of corporate travel spend.
Rather than overhauling familiar operations, virtual cards optimise and streamline the existing processes for hotels and travellers, making adoption simple. Businesses can then use their centralised view of spending to easily spot when it’s time to reclaim VAT and identify opportunities for future savings.
Hotel reconciliation for corporate travel
Following a trip, businesses have traditionally had to dedicate internal resource to chasing hotel invoices for manual reconciliation, matching spend data to gain a clear view of total spend.
Manual reconciliation is a time-consuming process. Increasingly, businesses are turning to hotel reconciliation services such as Conferma’s snap+ to minimise the internal processing time and cost of this need for manual admin.
snap+ allows for enriched data on all corporate travel spend to be viewed together in one central platform. Outstanding invoices are automatically collected before invoice data is verified and matched with transactions. An enhanced line-item breakdown report with rich data provides visibility on where funds have been allocated and spent, empowering businesses to make data-driven decisions and validate spending against internal policies.
How can expenses be centralised during travel?
Outside of hotel and transportation booking, businesses have historically had no real-time view of on-trip expenses.
Virtual cards allow businesses to centralise incidentals along with other travel spend. Employers can digitally deploy virtual cards straight to employees which can be added to their digital wallet for on-the-go payments.
Each card created can have custom spending restrictions set depending on traveller type to ensure travel policy compliance. As all cards are charged back to a central account, businesses also have access to enhanced expense reporting and a centralised spend view.
Why should companies centralise their travel bookings?
Centralising travel bookings has many benefits for businesses. With full oversight of travel expenses, businesses can closely manage policy compliance, identify opportunities to negotiate new rates with suppliers, and provide employees with additional support and resources. A centralised approach enhances the overall travel management process and can result in significant cost savings for a business.
How to centralise corporate travel with Conferma
When it comes to corporate travel, Conferma offers seamless payment capability, embedded directly into the existing booking process, allowing businesses to track corporate spend in one simple platform. Offering streamlined payment processes, automated reconciliation, enhanced control, real-time reporting, and seamless integration with trusted travel management systems.
Our extensive partner network of 80+ issuers, 90,000+ hotels, and hundreds of travel management companies allows you to use the travel management company you trust, pay with your bank, and book with your technology.
Book a corporate travel solutions demo today to learn how we can optimise your corporate travel payments processes.