future of business travel guide

Introduction

Business travel disruptions have become all too common. Evolving business practices, technical innovation, and climate uncertainty require a more seamless travel experience for administrators and travellers. While organisations can’t predict the future, they can position themselves to evolve with it. This eBook addresses the key issues that organisations need to consider to ensure they are ready for the future of business travel by looking at six considerations to enhance T&E management and position your organisation for continued success.

A cornerstone of this future-ready approach is Emburse Travel Analytics, offering a full suite of automated tools and services designed to proactively manage your travel programme, delivering serious savings and deep insights. At the heart of this offering is Emburse Reshop, a powerful tool that systematically reviews booked rates daily to identify when better rates become available and automatically rebooks lower air and hotel fares, ensuring your company captures savings when prices change.

Automate policy enforcement to free up your teams

In our 2023 Emburse Spend Management Trends Report, 26% of companies described travellers’ understanding of their policy needing improvement, and 6% rated it poor or non-existent. Travel policies must be living, well-communicated documents that address changes and trends. If not, they could confuse travellers and approvers and open the door for financial and other liabilities.

With flexible or hybrid working arrangements becoming the norm, employees have grown accustomed to buying everything with personal or corporate cards. Organisations using manual expense reporting methods experience higher rates of out-of-policy costs. Unmanaged spend, or indirect/tail spend, is on the rise, describing transactions outside traditional procurement and T&E that often come from a team's budget. Emburse's solutions, including Emburse Reshop, automate policy enforcement and help control this spend by ensuring bookings adhere to guidelines and capture the lowest available qualified fares.

Even with policy adjustments, Emburse Travel Analytics ensures that tools quickly incorporate changes to automate enforcement, streamlining reimbursements and eliminating back-and-forth over minor discrepancies.

Boost employee satisfaction with a mobile-centric experience

Over the decade, business travel innovation focused on enhancing travellers’ experience via mobile devices. Consumers have become accustomed to powerful and easy-to-use apps in their personal lives and expect the same experience at work. For an organisation to ensure that it can support its business travellers in the future, it must provide its employees with mobile-centric solutions.

Emburse solutions are mobile-first, optimising the travel and expense ecosystem from initial booking to expense submission. Key features include:

• Book and amend trips: Bookings and changes flow directly into the expense solution, even if standalone booking and expense management solutions are used.
• Automated Rebooking: With Emburse Reshop, travellers can be automatically notified and rebooked if a lower rate is found at a booked hotel or similar nearby properties, or for airfare, without agent intervention, enhancing convenience and capturing savings quicker. This demonstrates to suppliers your ability to shift business, enhancing negotiating leverage and buying power.
• Upload receipts and submit expense reports: Straightforward process with accurate and rapid data extraction and automated creation of data-rich expense line items from receipts.
• Integrate with other solutions: Seamlessly book, pay, and expense transactions for third-party, app-driven solutions without manual receipt submission.

Reduce fraud and wasteful spending with automated auditing

According to TravelPerk, expense fraud ranks among the most common types of employee fraud, accounting for 14.5% of all fraud uncovered. Auditing plays an essential role in combating fraud, but manual audits are time-intensive, costly, and prone to subjective opinion.

Forward-thinking organisations are leveraging technology to redefine auditing, focusing on holistic spend analysis rather than minor infringements. Emburse Travel Analytics provides fully automated, always-on auditing technology to track and review corporate travel market data, corporate negotiated rates, and supplier contracts. Specifically, its Contract Auditing feature reviews every booking to ensure negotiated fares and rates are available and correct, providing proactive reassurance that everything is running smoothly and that suppliers are delivering on agreements. This continuous, AI-driven analysis helps spot discrepancies with booked rates, inventory availability, and supplier agreements, preventing wasteful spending. Emburse also provides an independent team of expert auditors to effortlessly maintain compliance.

Streamline payment processes while boosting compliance

Corporate cards have become far more prevalent as organisations become more aware of their benefits, including cashback and fraud prevention capabilities. With virtual cards, control over purchases at the point of sale has become more sophisticated. Emburse allows for the instant issuance of virtual and physical corporate cards with built-in controls. Administrators can manage these on a granular level, restricting payments by MCC type (e.g., hotels, airlines) or even to individual chains/vendors, and enforcing spend limits over time or for maximum amounts. This flexibility allows organisations to expand corporate card use beyond frequent travellers, issuing time-bound cards to infrequent travellers or even interviewees.

Drive efficiency with a seamless end-to-end experience

A streamlined, highly-automated solution for entering receipts and creating and submitting expense reports is essential, but it plays a relatively minor role in expense processing. Emburse provides an integrated solution that delivers compliance through traveller convenience, with automated compliance checking, approval routing, and integrations with third-party systems being critical components of a rich, end-to-end experience. The platform is flexible to the line-item level, automatically routes expenses for approval, and incorporates an organisation’s policy-based routing rules, with the ability to alter them as demand changes.

Emburse's platform also features:

• Automated AP processes: Create purchase requisitions, route for approval, and convert them into purchase orders ready for suppliers.
• Two-way and three-way matching: Instantly compares POs and goods receipts against invoices and receivables before payment.
• AI-powered invoice capture: Extracts relevant information from vendor invoice images.
• Robust partnership ecosystem: Seamless integration across key business systems, including travel, HR, payroll, and finance, ensures an integrated solution.

Make smarter, data-driven decisions by leveraging analytics

CFOs and other organisational leaders increasingly expect decisions based on meaningful, accurate, and timely data. While travel agencies can provide reports on air, hotel, and rail bookings, they often miss large volumes of spend like out-of-channel bookings, ground transportation, and meals. Emburse's expense management solutions capture all spend, whether on corporate cards or personal funds, containing millions of individual data points.

Emburse Travel Analytics, especially with the data captured through Emburse Reshop, provides powerful analytics to elevate your strategy. The results from Emburse Reshop are instantly available in online dashboards, displaying insights such as:

• How much can you save and how much was realised?
• Has system performance changed over time?
• How well are negotiated hotels and rates performing?

This comprehensive data analysis enhances:

• Spend Analysis: Analyse spend by department, location, category, etc., identifying trends or anomalies like higher-than-average meal expenses or out-of-channel bookings.
• Vendor Performance & Negotiations: Gain awareness about spend with particular vendors or hotel chains. Emburse accurately measures the value of your air programme using its Lowest Qualified Fare (LQF) metric, comparing your negotiated fares to the lowest comparable fares in the open market. Fair Market Share (FMS) Analysis independently measures your organisation’s market share against other customers, eliminating reliance on supplier data. This provides the insights needed to secure favourable rates for maintaining high spend volume and monitoring preferred vendors. With Full Content Visibility, including non-GDS and NDC channels, you can proactively identify issues with negotiated fares.
• Identifying Spend Patterns: Uncover employees frequently submitting expenses just below receipt thresholds or approvers continually approving out-of-policy spending.
• Benchmarking: Objective data provides deep insights into the rates and fares companies like yours are paying across the market, allowing you to benchmark, compare, and measure air and hotel suppliers at company, brand, and property levels. This allows you to monitor and benchmark negotiated agreements to easily see how your programme is doing and share results with stakeholders.

Emburse Travel Analytics, particularly Emburse Reshop, offers a third-party perspective that provides savings and actionable insights that Travel Management Companies (TMCs) often do not, as TMCs generally don’t want to highlight discrepancies in the rates they’re offering. This capability enables smarter, data-driven decisions that can deliver substantial financial benefits, from reducing wasteful spending and cutting fraud to securing discounts.

Future-proof your travel program with an automated T&E solution

Becoming a future-ready organisation requires action on several levels. Adopting next-generation technology is a vital enabler, coupled with organisational change and a willingness to be flexible. Emburse solutions are flexible and configurable, designed to support current T&E needs with the ability to evolve in the future. They communicate easily with other corporate systems as part of a broader ecosystem and have the flexibility for business rules, from expense policy changes to approval routing.

Emburse is an established innovator with a history of firsts, including the first airline contract auditing solution and the first mobile-capable expense solution. We are customer-centric, leveraging deep industry expertise to provide solutions that solve for what’s next. As Athena Gazikas, Senior Expense Administrator at International Services Inc., states, “Emburse is always looking for the next solution to bring to its customers. We know that with Emburse, we have access to the latest and greatest technologies."