As a Travel Manager, you're at the forefront of ensuring your employees' well-being while optimising corporate spend. In today's dynamic global business environment, particularly when dealing with UK and EU trips, this dual responsibility has never been more challenging. Business travel is recovering, with global spending projected to reach £1.6 trillion ($2 trillion) within three years, yet inflationary pressures continue to bring uncertainty and a need for strategic process enhancements. The question is: Is your duty of care keeping pace with the constant flux of travel prices and policies?
The Unpredictable Nature of Modern Business Travel
The world of corporate travel is anything but static. Hotel and air prices frequently drop after a reservation has been made. Travellers might inadvertently book out-of-policy, or even worse, negotiated rates might not be offered at the point of sale. This constant fluctuation, coupled with evolving business practices, technical innovation, and climate uncertainty, leads to frequent disruptions.
For you, this means a continuous effort to:
- Identify strategic process enhancements to elevate the overall travel experience while optimising travel policy compliance and spend control.
- Ensure clear communication on safe travel locations, regulatory requirements, and corporate travel policy updates.
- Prioritise the health and wellness of each corporate traveller, implementing an effective managed travel programme that upholds their physical and mental well-being.
These complexities directly impact your duty of care obligations, which include providing a clear travel management platform, enabling travellers with real-time insights, and ensuring they know how to get assistance on the road.
The Duty of Care Imperative in a Dynamic World
Your employees expect a seamless, mobile-centric experience in their work lives, mirroring the ease they find in personal apps. They need to be able to book and amend trips, upload receipts, and integrate with other solutions effortlessly. Moreover, their physical and mental well-being during travel is paramount, requiring you to provide tools to assess travel risks, offer wellness programmes, and supply mental health resources.
This isn't just about compliance; it's about employee satisfaction and retention. Offering flexibility in travel purchases, like relaxing lowest-fare requirements for more convenient flights, can significantly increase employee happiness and positively impact long-term retention. However, manually managing these dynamic factors while ensuring compliance and cost control is a monumental task.
The Emburse Reshop Advantage: Automating Duty of Care and Savings
This is where Emburse Reshop becomes an indispensable asset for Travel Managers. It's designed to provide fully automated, always-on daily monitoring and rebooking for air and hotel, securing the lowest possible rates and maximising savings. More importantly for duty of care, Emburse Reshop provides savings AND unbiased analytics.
Here's how Emburse Reshop empowers your duty of care:
- Continuous Compliance, Automated: Emburse Reshop automatically searches for savings on every booking, every day. If a lower rate is found, it automatically cancels the higher fare and rebooks travellers to the best price without manual intervention. This ensures that even when itineraries change for cost savings (like an £69 ($86)/night saving opportunity for hotels), your travellers are always booked within policy and have up-to-date itinerary information.
- Actionable Insights for Proactive Management: You gain access to online dashboards and actionable insights into savings potential, realised savings, system performance over time, and the performance of your negotiated hotels and rates. This data is crucial for making informed decisions, proactively adjusting policies, and enhancing your duty of care strategies.
- Unbiased Third-Party Oversight: Unlike Travel Management Companies (TMCs) that "generally don’t want to highlight discrepancies in the rates they’re offering," Emburse provides a third-party perspective and unbiased insights. This ensures that rebooking decisions are solely focused on maximising savings and compliance, without conflicts of interest.
- Enhanced Negotiation Leverage: By monitoring and benchmarking negotiated agreements against market standards, Emburse Reshop provides objective data that strengthens your future negotiations with vendors. The ability to demonstrate that you can "shift share" by finding lower rates at similar properties enhances your negotiating leverage and buying power.
- Customisable Policy Controls: Reshop allows for customisable rebooking specifications based on location, department, hotel chain, staff level, and other criteria. This flexibility ensures that even with automated changes, policies are consistently enforced, reducing out-of-policy expenses and strengthening compliance.
- Global Reach & Data Security: Emburse offers a global solution and is GDPR Ready and Privacy Shield Compliant, addressing critical data protection concerns for UK/EU trips.
Emburse, recognised as a Leader in AI-Enabled Travel & Expense, delivers innovative end-to-end travel management software that is highly automated and mobile-first. This commitment to "future-proof" solutions means you have access to the "latest and greatest technologies," ensuring your duty of care programme remains agile amidst shifting conditions.
Future-Proofing Your Travel Programme
By integrating solutions like Emburse Reshop, you transform your travel programme into a profit driver, not just a cost centre. It enables you to deliver efficiency, time savings, increase financial visibility, enhance spend control and compliance, and improve the entire business travel experience. This means your employees benefit from confidence and convenience when booking, and a simple process to record and submit expenses, all while staying connected and safe.
Don't let the complexities of dynamic travel compromise your duty of care. Discover how Emburse Reshop can provide the automation, insights, and control you need to safeguard your travellers and optimise your travel spend.
Ready to ensure your duty of care is truly future-ready? Learn more about Emburse Reshop and its transformative impact on corporate travel.