Selecting a Travel Management Solution

Why full-cycle travel management is the future

Economic uncertainty, global tensions, and the pressure to keep pace with rapidly advancing technology are pushing companies to focus on controlling costs, with technology playing a central role. In fact, a recent PwC study revealed that 44% of CFOs consider tech-driven cost reduction a top priority for the year ahead.

But here's the thing: you can't effectively manage expenses without addressing travel costs, which are second only to salaries and benefits. Many companies make the mistake of focusing solely on expense management, overlooking the powerful advantages of full-cycle travel management.

Think of travel management as a complete journey, not just a series of expense reports. Full-cycle travel management goes beyond basic expense tracking to encompass everything from initial trip planning through final reimbursement. This holistic approach delivers impressive results; organizations typically see a 20% reduction in spending and 70% quicker reimbursements.

The benefits extend far beyond cost savings, too. When companies implement full-cycle travel management, they gain valuable data insights, stronger policy compliance, and—perhaps most importantly—happier travelers who enjoy more convenient booking processes and faster reimbursements.

As the name implies, a full-cycle travel management solution should deliver end-to-end support, including:

Pre-trip authorization

Pre-approval processes help validate travel requests against budgets and policies, ensuring every trip is necessary and worth the investment. This proactive approach prevents unnecessary spending and keeps departments within their allocated travel budgets.

Policy enforcement

Automated expense controls can be added to handle everything from routine approvals to exception management, streamlining the process while maintaining compliance. When set up correctly, many routine requests can be auto-approved, saving time for both travelers and approvers.

Travel provider integrations

An effective solution connects your preferred airlines, hotels, and ground transportation providers into one unified booking experience. This integration eliminates data silos and booking friction while maintaining provider choice and negotiated rates.

Data-driven insights

Complete visibility across travel bookings, expenses, and card transactions is key to revealing actionable insights. By analyzing consolidated spend data, companies can identify savings opportunities, optimize supplier relationships, and refine policies for maximum impact.

With business travel on the rise again, there’s no better time to adopt a more strategic, full-cycle approach that transforms travel from a cost center into a competitive advantage.

Five key features of a full-cycle travel management solution

A full-cycle travel management solution transforms how organizations handle business travel by integrating five critical features that simultaneously control costs, improve traveler experience, and ensure policy compliance. Let’s take a closer look at each of them.

Travel booking

A great travel management solution makes booking trips as easy as ordering takeout while keeping your company's budget and policies firmly in check.

It should work across any device, letting employees book flights, trains, hotels, and ground transportation with just a few clicks. As employees browse options, the system should automatically highlight the most cost-effective and policy-compliant choices, including the lowest logical fares. It should also feature carbon emission tracking to help employees make more sustainable travel choices.

It’s crucial that the solution supports pre-trip approval workflows to ensure all travel expenses align with both company and department budgets. More advanced solutions can help track unused tickets, too, ensuring that you get the most value from your travel budget.

When it comes to travel management company (TMC) integration, avoid limiting yourself to solutions that work with just one provider. Instead, choose a solution that partners with multiple leading TMCs worldwide. This flexibility lets you maintain relationships with your preferred travel partners while ensuring seamless data flow between systems.

Hotel and air reshopping

The best travel management solutions continuously monitor existing hotel and air reservations for lower rates or fares. When a better deal is found, it automatically rebooks the reservation to deliver maximum savings without manual intervention. This automation is crucial as half of the potential savings could be lost if rebooking is done manually since the best fares and rates often last only a few minutes.

Your travel management solution should also help traveling employees make cost-effective decisions during the booking process. When it comes to hotels, for example, it should suggest similar quality, less expensive hotels within a reasonable radius of the original booking. For flights, it should automatically compare GDS-EDIFACT (Global Distribution System) with NDC (New Distribution Capability) fares and recommend the lowest fares every time.

As a bonus, your solution should also extend its reshopping capability by integrating with other travel management tools, such as Amadeus Cytric, allowing travelers to access hotel shopping and rebooking services directly through the Cytric platform.

Travel audit

Automating the auditing process lets you continuously monitor and analyze travel bookings to identify and resolve issues related to rates, availability, and supplier agreements.

This eliminates the need for periodic, manual spot checks as the system automatically monitors every booked rate or fare, comparing them against contracts and market rates. It also ensures that suppliers honor their agreements, inventory availability is accurately represented, discount calculations are correct, and that promised amenities are provided.

Automated auditing also plays a crucial role in maintaining policy compliance. It checks every reservation to ensure travelers are booking within policy guidelines, verifies that travelers are using trusted suppliers, and confirms that correct rates and fare classes are being applied. If any discrepancies are detected, the solution can automatically move travelers to compliant options or provide clear instructions on how to resolve issues without requiring intervention from travel managers.

Having a digital auditor that’s working for you 24/7 significantly reduces the risk of overspending and fraud because it allows finance to identify and address issues quickly based on real-time data. Most importantly, it frees your team from a tedious and manual process to focus on more strategic work.

Travel benchmarking

Similar to the travel audit, benchmarking lets you precisely evaluate travel contracts, ensuring negotiated discounts are properly applied, and actual savings align with market rates.

Only by comparing discounts against similar companies at granular levels—down to specific hotel properties and air routes—rather than relying on approximate travel volumes can you gain deeper insights into the true value of your agreements.

Through detailed supplier-level analysis, you can monitor how well vendors honor corporate discounts and maintain the availability of negotiated rates. This will help you identify underperforming agreements that should be renegotiated or replaced. More advanced benchmarking solutions take this process further by using machine learning to forecast potential savings from adjusted discount thresholds or new supplier partnerships, eliminating the need to wait months to validate your options.

Benchmarking is the best way to strengthen your organization’s negotiation position and secure favorable air and hotel discounts that deliver tangible bottom-line impact.

Travel companion mobile app

A travel companion mobile app is a powerful tool for companies to fulfill their duty of care obligations while enhancing the business travel experience. Many solutions provide a mobile app as a means for travelers to capture receipts on the go, but it can be much more than that.

The app can become a traveler’s sole touchpoint by creating a unified digital itinerary that encompasses air, hotel, car, rail, and ground transport reservations, along with dining and meeting schedules. It can make pre-trip planning seamless by sending travelers destination-specific health and safety information, policy guidance, and documentation requirements.

During travel, the app provides critical real-time support through flight alerts, local city guides, and instant access to ground transportation options. It maintains a direct line to emergency contacts and enables location tracking, allowing companies to provide immediate assistance when needed. If necessary, travel managers can push relevant safety updates and messages directly to travelers' devices.

A travel companion app can also empower organizations and traveling employees to monitor and minimize their environmental impact through detailed carbon footprint tracking across all travel components, from flights to accommodation choices.

Again, a travel companion mobile app is more than just about simplifying expense reporting. It can be a support lifeline that significantly reduces stress and boosts productivity for travelers on the go.

Why adaptability should not be overlooked

Let’s zoom out and talk about implementing a T&E solution.

Because, at the end of the day, travel management and expense management need to be unified on one platform to be effective. The reality, however, is that implementing a new T&E solution can be a complex challenge that even the most seasoned finance leaders find daunting—and not for reasons you’d expect.

It’s not securing a budget or getting management buy-in, though those, too, can be significant hurdles. No, the biggest challenge lies in correctly evaluating the less tangible aspects of a solution, like ease of use, scalability, integration, and support, which often reveal themselves late into the project or after launch.

For example, one business leader found out too late that their new mobile receipt capture app frustrated employees with its imprecise framing—the camera interface shows a full screen but actually captures only a partial image. Another leader realized that their solution lacked the right integrations and struggled with a disjointed expense management process, where one department had to manually print summaries for finance to re-enter into the accounting system. Yet another executive lamented the inability to create custom segments, with vendors charging exorbitant fees and taking months to implement even minor changes.

These supposedly minor issues are not to be trivialized. When a T&E solution fails to meet a business need, the burden falls on internal teams to bridge the gaps—consuming valuable time and resources through manual workarounds. Small inconveniences can quickly snowball into big setbacks.

Here’s what you need to consider in choosing an adaptable T&E solution:

Pricing

Choose a solution that offers both per-user and per-report pricing models and configure a package that best matches your usage patterns. Be cautious of vendors charging for every created report rather than only approved ones, as this can inflate costs due to revisions or accidental submissions. Carefully consider any minimum seat requirements or report processing caps imposed by providers to ensure they align with your organization's size and reporting volume.

Ease of Use

An effective T&E solution should be intuitive and require minimal training. Look for low- or no-code solutions that enable quick customizations and provide consistent experiences across desktop and mobile devices. The right solution should not require dedicated staff to maintain it.

Scalability

Select a solution that matches your current needs while accommodating future growth. Small businesses will benefit from mobile-enabled platforms with clean interfaces, while larger organizations need solutions without arbitrary limitations on customization options.

Configurability

Prioritize solutions offering unlimited custom fields and user-level policy control. The solution should support sophisticated approval routing based on expense attributes, report characteristics, and user parameters at the line-item level.

Integration

Ensure that your solution can seamlessly connect with travel management companies, accounting platforms, and CRM systems. Look for solutions with open APIs that enable custom integrations without creating closed ecosystems or vendor lock-in.

Support

Seek providers offering multi-channel support including chat, phone, and on-site assistance. Implementation support will significantly accelerate time to value and minimize the risk of not delivering positive ROI. In-app guidance is crucial to freeing up finance from playing the role of tech support.

Conclusion

Travel management transformation demands a holistic approach, not incremental solutions. Simply implementing a new travel booking process, for example, provides minimal impact compared to an integrated T&E solution that addresses inefficiencies across the entire travel experience.

These challenges affect more than just travelers. They extend to finance and travel management teams, too, who have to deal with more manual work, playing tech support, and making decisions without real-time insights. Because full-cycle travel management isn't a luxury—it's about automating critical functionalities that finance and travel teams already manage, such as booking, contract auditing, and policy enforcement. It is a necessity for operational efficiency and streamlined processes.

When evaluating T&E solutions, prioritize adaptability. While features matter, a solution's true value lies in its capacity to scale, integrate, and evolve alongside organizational needs. A seemingly cost-effective solution that lacks configurability can quickly become a liability, forcing teams to develop manual workarounds that ultimately undermine the expected ROI and operational improvements.