Travel represents a significant amount of employees’ time and a huge expense for the company.

Use it only when personal contact is recommended and not other communication form is available. Various video-conference tools exist, depending on your needs. Ask yourself whether you need a large integrated hardware system, or just cheap video conference software to use with your own laptop and webcam.

When you decide to let your employees make the trip, set a sound travel policy first. Without travel policy, wasteful decisions are more easily made, especially when the person travelling decides on the details himself. Once the travel policy is made, communicate it to all employees.

• Book early. One month in advance at least. Two months in advance is even better.
• When this is not possible anymore, check prices regularly for flights on best fares websites as alibabuy.com or govoyages.com. For hotels, you can check on booking.com or hotels.com.
• Business class: It should be consider only for an overall travel time that exceed 12 hours.
• Airports: Consider the different airports that are maximum two hours away from your company. They may have some better prices on specific destinations (Charleroi, Maastricht, Cologne..).
• Negotiate taxi shuttle services: Consider taxi (even more when for a group) that may be cheaper than the airport parking (often exceed 50€ after 3 days)

• Consolidate your spending: In this way, you can negotiate price breaks with preferred travel partners. According to Business Travel News, midsize companies still book 31 percent of their flights, 35 percent of their hotel rooms, and 20 percent of their rental cars with non-preferred vendors.
• Online telephony: Prefer using skype instead of the hotel phones.

When you finally make the expense, try to use an expense management system. As is so often the case in cost reduction: "if you can measure it, you can manage it".

Categories : Advices | Tags : Travel | 0 commentaire associé