Global travel was brought to an astonishing halt with COVID-19. Corporate travel was the worst hit and has shown a much slower recovery than personal travel. Even then, the initial months of 2021 showed signs of relief for travel agencies across the U.S.

This was fueled by the successful rollout of vaccines and freshly updated guidelines from the Centre of Disease Control and Prevention, which stated that travel was safe for vaccinated people.

With these changing times, companies are often left with the question of how they can approach the future of corporate travel?

This article covers everything business leaders need to know to plan and reboot their corporate travel sector for 2022. Let’s dig in!

How can businesses plan the next phase of corporate travel?

Some quick tips to get started with:

• Business leaders and executives need to understand how to boost employee confidence and security during corporate travel. Mapping efficient plans to help them achieve this transition can prove to be a huge stepping stone.
• Such a plan must include every stakeholder in its ecosystem, from suppliers (hotel chains, airlines, cab/rental services, and ride-sharing businesses) to travel middlemen (agencies, OTAs, and planners.)
• Businesses need to revisit the travel reimbursement policies to ensure a seamless reporting system that makes employee expense management more straightforward.

4 ways businesses can gear up to the future of business travel 

1. Leverage real-time data 
   Not using data to improve one’s decision-making makes planning for the future feel like throwing a stone into a clouded field. Instead, organizations need to invest in their capabilities to identify and utilize patterns and trends in business travel.

Online travel agencies can act as potential new data sources as they’re uniquely positioned to access such aggregates. For example, while booking an airline for a journey, the agency can inform how many others in the same sector are flying or have reserved seats on the same flight.

Also, if you’re primarily worried about the fluctuations in costs and availability of tickets, your travel agency could provide you with information on which flights usually stay on schedule; thus, helping you have more control over your decisions. It can also help you make deals with frequented hotel and airline chains to optimize costs.

2. Have an agile planning process
   Have detailed plans and recovery mechanisms for multiple scenarios in place. For example, if there’s a sudden surge of demand, you might end up finding out that there’s no time to sit back and plan; you’ll need to act.

Keeping this in mind, take into account the following four considerations while planning for the future of business travel:

• First, understand the extent of business travel required by your company. If your employees are to visit abroad, understand the current rules and regulations around business travel in those countries.
• Second, to ensure that even as airline fares go through multiple iterations, other data points like customer surveys, data from OTAs, industry trends, and real-time pricing from Global Distribution Systems have stayed in and around what was initially projected.
• Third, your company’s travel and expense policies: What are your new mileage limits? Do employees still have to store receipts for claiming reimbursements physically, or will you automate the process by using an expense software? What are your rules on the usage of public transport? What are the differences in the activities in which non-vaccinated, partially vaccinated, and fully vaccinated employees can participate?
• Fourth, all essential information an employee needs during travel: relevant websites, travel help numbers, and other emergency contacts.

3. Focus on employee safety and comfort
   Employers and travel agencies must work closely to bridge the gap by finding new ways to provide travelers a sense of safety and peace of mind during business travel.

Always ensure that the traveler has control over the decisions that affect their comfort and mental well-being.

Simple examples here could be airlines improving their check-in experience by letting employees choose the seats of their preference or pre-ordering their in-flight meals. Hotels, in turn, could allow the guests to decide the times atin which they’d need their meals and housekeeping.

4. Over-communicate
   Travel has changed forever – the number of masks to be worn, border regulations, boarding procedures, vaccination requirements, hygiene needs, and more. Therefore, it becomes crucial for companies to always keep themselves and their employees in the loop. An easy start for that would be to have an open and active channel from the planning stages of the trip to the post-trip.  This could be something as simple as an email thread between attendees, or it could be everyone meeting virtually with a webinar platform.  Whatever the case, you want to make sure that all traveling team members know what to expect.

Being proactive in informing your employees on all kinds of changes, be it organization-wide policies or granular modifications help prevent any confusion in the employee minds while they’re doing their tasks. It also helps them stay confident while on business travel.

Conclusion

Corporate travel is on the rise again, this means some employees are going to have to adjust to it because their job demands so.

With unpredictability becoming the new normal, it is becoming inevitable that as long as duties are done perfectly (by using appropriate software for travel expense reporting), corporate travel can be taken head first, with ease.