You can spend weeks creating a corporate travel policy. Get input from HR and Finance. Set approval levels. Determine hotel guidelines. Spell out who can fly business class and when. Put the finished document somewhere everyone can find it.
And then Rachel books her own flight like she’s planning a vacation without a care in the world, much less a care about your corporate travel policy. Before blaming Rachel (entirely), take another look at the company policy.
Employees don’t usually go around corporate travel policies for the thrill of breaking the rules. They do it because they have a meeting in 30 minutes, a deadline to keep, and a work travel itinerary that doesn’t seem to match the scenario the policy was written for.
The key to good corporate travel management is creating enough structure to protect the company without making business travel unnecessarily difficult for the people doing the traveling.
Build Your Policy Around How Your Team Travels
A company whose employees make frequent, last-minute trips needs a different policy from one whose team attends three conferences a year. Yet many travel policies start with rules before anyone takes a close look at the trips themselves.
Who travels most often? Where are they going? How much advance notice do they typically have? How frequently do plans change? Are there executives traveling internationally? Teams traveling together? Employees who regularly go from the airport straight to a meeting?
Those answers should shape the policy.
An itinerary that makes perfect sense for a two-hour domestic flight may be unreasonable for someone crossing several time zones before an important presentation. The policy needs enough flexibility to recognize the difference without requiring someone to reinvent the rules every time.
Be Crystal Clear About What Matters
Not every travel decision needs a policy attached to it, but some things absolutely do. Your company may have specific requirements for approvals, airlines, classes of service, hotels, billing, ground transportation, or how travel is booked.
Spell those out. Then decide where travelers have room to make choices.
Frequent travelers tend to develop preferences for a reason. They know which flights work with their work and personal schedules, which airports make certain connections easier, where they need to sit to get work done, and which hotel puts them closest to where they need to be in the morning.
You don’t have to accommodate every request. But a travel policy works better and has a better chance of being followed when it considers that the person taking the trip might know a few things about getting there.
Look at the Whole Trip, Not Just One Line Item
Corporate travel decisions rarely exist in isolation. A flight may arrive too late for the meeting when you add local traffic congestion. A different routing may add hours to the trip. The hotel that fits neatly within a predetermined guideline may be nowhere near the client’s office. A ticket with less flexibility can become a pricey problem when an executive’s schedule changes.
Business travel has a lot of moving parts. That’s why CIRE looks at timing, routing, flexibility, risk, and the purpose of the trip when helping corporate clients make travel decisions. The goal isn’t simply to present options. It’s to understand what the traveler needs to accomplish and put together a trip that supports it.
Your corporate travel policy should allow for the same line of thinking.
There Are Exceptions to the Corporate Travel Rules, Too
Sometimes, somebody is going to need an exception.
The meeting was scheduled yesterday. The only doable flight doesn’t fit the policy guidelines. The trip changed after it was approved. There’s an international itinerary with considerations that don’t come up on the usual overnight trip to Chicago.
Decide ahead of time how exceptions are handled, who can approve them, and which situations truly need approval. Otherwise, every unusual trip becomes its own little corporate referendum.
It’s also worth watching for the same exception appearing repeatedly. At some point, that stops being an exception and starts being information. Maybe that’s the time to update your official travel policy.
Make the Policy Easier to Follow Than to Avoid
An employee shouldn’t have to reread the corporate travel policy every time a trip comes up. Nor should the person managing travel have to answer the same questions, check the same requirements, and keep track of everyone’s individual preferences over and over again. The policy should be built into the process.
An expense platform can help a company set spending rules, collect receipts, and track what employees spend. Some also offer travel booking, but booking a flight is only one part of managing a trip. When plans change, a connection is missed, or a traveler needs an itinerary that doesn’t fit neatly into a booking tool, someone still has to work through the options and solve the problem. That’s where an experienced travel advisor makes the difference: the software helps track the spend, while the advisor helps the person traveling.
CIRE Travel establishes company travel requirements and individual traveler profiles as part of managing corporate accounts, including the details that affect how each person travels. Reporting can also help companies keep an eye on travel spend, unused tickets, and patterns across the program.
That makes the policy much easier to live with because there’s someone in charge of managing it.
Pay Attention to What the Policy Is Telling You
Once a policy is in place, see how it works in the real world.
Are travelers constantly requesting the same exception? Is one part of the approval process slowing everyone down? Are people booking outside the program? Are unused tickets being tracked and applied?
Companies grow. Travelers change. Airline schedules update. Hotel markets evolve. The policy should be allowed to change, too.
The Best Corporate Travel Policy Makes Everyone’s Job (and Life) Easier
The employee’s job is to get where they need to go and do the work they were sent there to do. HR, Operations, Finance, or whoever drew the short straw and became responsible for corporate travel has plenty to do already.
A well-managed travel program makes life easier for everyone. It sets clear expectations, allows for sensible exceptions, and gives travelers a clear path to getting help. Then, with CIRE’s corporate travel planners in charge, you have experts who understand the policy and have the travel industry connections to maximize your team’s time.
If you’re creating a travel policy or revisiting one that employees struggle to follow, explore our Corporate Travel FAQs or talk with CIRE. We can help you build a program that works for your company and the people who travel for it.
CIRE Travel is a full-service travel agency headquartered in New York, NY with offices in Kennebunkport, ME, Washington, DC, Boston, MA, Atlanta, GA, Los Angeles, CA, and Philadelphia, PA. Our expert corporate travel planners, honeymoon travel agents, and luxury travel planners support clients across the country and around the world.
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