Pre-trip travel data creates endless opportunities for travel managers to connect with travelers prior to departure, ensuring bookings are compliant and identifying missed cost savings opportunities before lift-off.
What Are Business Travel Costs?
Business travel expenses can be defined as costs associated with traveling for the purpose of conducting company-related activities. Some travel expenses can call for tax deductions such as traveling for a conference or meeting. Expenses such as lavish expenses for personal purchases are not deductible. Hotel and lodging would also qualify for a business expense as this is a category that is deemed necessary and deductible by the IRS.
Companies' bottom lines are being closely monitored as the pandemic continues meddling with corporate financials. Travel managers have a unique opportunity to combine the powers of Traxo’s pre-trip travel data capabilities with rate re-shopping tools, such as TRIPBAM and Coupa’s Travel Saver product, to improve corporate travel program savings and ease their executives’ worries.
Through Traxo’s industry partnerships, travel managers can ensure that their supplier relationships and program goals are supported with every booking.
How to Reduce Business Travel Costs
The days of spending countless hours every month pulling reports from multiple sources, manually manipulating data, and trying to merge it into a single format for business reporting are finally over. There’s no reason to miss a booking again, regardless of its originating booking source — TMC, OTA, supplier-direct. Traxo captures off-channel (OTA’s and supplier-direct) bookings in addition to those booked through your preferred channels (such as a TMC).
Now, you can stop manually scrolling through your booked TMC reservations every day to ensure your travelers have booked at your preferred hotels and the correct contractual rates and value-add items (WiFi, parking, breakfast, etc.) were applied.
Instead, join companies such as ZS Associates and Ritche Bros. Auctioneers who are on a journey to manage travel programs smarter! Introducing the travel management efficiencies Traxo provides into your day-to-day workflow will ensure you have complete booking visibility with virtually no manual effort.
Drive Savings to your Bottom Line with Rate Re-Shopping
Assuring your travelers are receiving the best rates and identifying new savings opportunities are impossible feats without complete travel data. Rate assurance tools can revolutionize your program savings, but limited data prevents them from reaching their full potential. Fortunately, Traxo makes it easy to automatically send your booking data to your rate service providers so they can optimize both TMC and non-TMC bookings.
Rate Re-Shopping Behind the Scenes
Although rate re-shopping is a familiar concept to most Travel Managers, the concept may be new to some. Below is a glimpse into the incredibly easy and seamless process available to serve the needs of your evolving program:
- Your traveler books a hotel reservation through any booking site and their itinerary are automatically and immediately captured within Traxo.
- The booking information is passed to your rate re-shopping tool.
- The rate re-shopping tool validates both the rate and the contractual terms to ensure the hotel is adhering to its contractual obligations.
- Identified discrepancies will create an alert.
- Either your TMC (or the traveler if they booked directly) will take the corrective action to ensure you pay the best possible price.
All of this data gathering and verification happens behind the scenes, providing you with a touchless and seamless audit of your travel transactions, while also alerting your TMC or traveler of savings opportunities and actions to take.
Hotel Rate Re-Shopping Prior to Departure
By ensuring rates are reviewed and corrected before a trip occurs, you no longer need to rely on the traveler to remember the correct rate and have the traveler verify the rate upon check-in. When rate re-shopping happens behind the scenes and prior to departure (using pre-trip travel data collected by Traxo), the potential risk for human error and unwanted stress after a long day of travel are eliminated.
Realize Cost Savings and Reduce Traveler Friction
When introducing the right travel data aggregation and price assurance tools into your program, you introduce automation, efficiency and reduce traveler friction.
Your travelers are only human and we’re all prone to error. Depending on how strict your policy is, the slightest human error could lead to partial or no reimbursement following a business trip, creating undue stress and a financial burden for the traveler.
With automation in place, you can eliminate traveler stress surrounding non-compliant bookings or misspending, knowing that rates have been audited and re-shopped well before that expense report hits the desks of your AP team. Your team will quickly reap the benefits of up-front savings and eliminate the back-and-forth communication between you, your traveler and the hotel.
Rate Re-Shop with Pre-Trip Travel Data from Traxo
Correcting travel itineraries with access to pre-trip data and rate re-shopping tools has never been easier.
Contact Traxo to learn more about how you can enhance your program’s efficiencies, drive savings opportunities, and reduce traveler friction, without lifting a finger. Find out more about how Traxo and travel data can reduce business travel costs.
