Business Travel
Article | May 17, 2023
Flight carriers across the world are constantly processing bookings from travelers. To keep up with the demand, they need to be on top of everything. Technological advances have helped airline reservations move away from a manual system. At a time when commercial aviation relied on physical systems, they offered tickets through dedicated reservation centers dotting popular cities. Such facilities had employees to assign paper tickets to travelers. These paper tickets represented the sale of a seat on a flight. But as more and more people could afford air travel, alterations became necessary and a stressful process. The challenges in airline reservation were mostly related to mobility, alterations, and refund and the solution was an online flight ticket reservation system that addressed them all at once.
Cut to 2022. Today, we book flight tickets on-the-go using an automated passenger reservation system, thanks to the computerized reservation systems that are crucial for any airline company or tour operator to offer outstanding customer experience to travelers.
Airline Reservation System: Getting into the Nitty-gritty
The airline industry is not an exception to cut-throat competition, as the number of airline companies has seen a rapid increase in the last few decades. Every company is trying to adopt a new technological solution or business strategy that can help generate higher revenue, offer its customers a satisfying customer experience, and remain up-to-speed with the dynamic demands of the industry. This need to stay ahead of the game led to the creation of the airline reservation system.
An airline reservation system is a web-based flight booking engine used to conduct flight bookings. The bookings are made by collating information such as airline schedules, fare tariffs, passenger reservations, and PNRs with the help of global distribution systems. This system provides real-time inventory and rates for travel agents and travelers so they can choose from the many options available.
Flight Ticket Reservation System Streamlines Flight Booking Processes
A flight reservation system streamlines air ticket booking with key features that make it easy for a travel agent or traveler to book a ticket from their computers or phones. Here are the components of online flight ticket reservation system:
Reservation Management
Inventory Management
Multi-city search Option
Payment Gateway Integration
A Mobile-friendly design
A Customizable System
Online Reservation Facility
Multi-language Compatibility
Why Airline Companies and Tour Providers Depend on Travel Tech Providers?
Airline companies like yours make it a point to use a computer reservation system to achieve their revenue goals. Tour operators also rely heavily on flight ticket reservation system so that they can offer their end customers a platform for mobile airline reservation. Let us take a look at the many ways an online flight ticket reservation systems has changed the airline industry:
Bookings Don’t Have to Wait
Tour operators and travelers can buy flight tickets 24/7 without having to visit a physical counter. This increases convenience and makes the process of booking a ticket hassle-free. Consequently, your business remains available for your customers through your flight ticket reservation system provider around the clock, so they don’t have to struggle to book the ticket.
Your Staff Can Focus on More Important Tasks
With the help of an online booking system, you can reduce the administrative time that your staff spends on tedious filing and noting down customer information. Easily automate key tasks such as payments, report generations, waiver signing, and reservation and let your staff focus on other important tasks. Additionally, customer success teams can give their time to important issues than mitigating smaller challenges.
API Integrations are Your Best Friend
Online booking systems allow API integrations with large distributors and well-known brands within the travel sector. This can make your airline visible to a larger customer base. Such tech integrations can get you more bookings and help you with branding.
Offer an Enhanced Customer Experience
When you integrate flight ticket reservation system solution into your website, you offer end customers a seamless experience. They are in charge of the entire process, right from exploring the flights you offer to checking-in at a time that is convenient for them.
Get Insights into Your Business
You can get valuable insights through the analytics dashboard that tells you about popular sellers, add-ons, time-slots, and seasons using a flight ticket reservation system technology. You can get a clear idea on what’s working for the customers and what isn’t. You can improve your offerings and business processes to achieve business growth.
Last Thoughts
Integrating an online flight reservation system into your airline or tour operations business can help you keep up with the current market trends, and grow your sales and market share.
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Hospitality Management
Article | June 20, 2023
Corporate travel and entertainment are almost every company's second-largest controllable expense after payroll and other benefits offered to employees. When it comes to such expenses, manually recording them on paper, saving crumpled receipts, or even creating Excel spreadsheets doesn’t ensure efficiency.
Businesses are implementing software that automates travel and expense management to streamline operations, cut costs and reduce the frustration that repetitive tasks bring. They are leveraging expense data to categorize their travel spends based on projects, departments, and cost centers to stay on top of all their travel-related expenses and financial operations.
Control & Transparency Matter
Global accounting teams put two things above all else: control and transparency. Without these two, they leave room for risk and mishaps and cannot function efficiently. Travel and expense automation allows financial and accounting teams to see where every dollar is spent. Bills and reimbursements are paid diligently and without much scope for error or expense fraud. Accurate, transparent data can then become the foundation of business decisions on spend and expense forecasting.
Employees Dislike Mundane Tasks
Your employees have important job functions that they need to carry out on a daily basis. A cloud-based tool that they can access at anytime and from anywhere helps them look at travel expense reporting in a different way. They can spend their time doing productive tasks that do not involve mundane paperwork or tallying expenses manually.
Managers Expect Budgeting Compliance
No manager is a fan of going over a long paper trail of expenses and verifying if every expense complies with company policy. A travel and expense management software highlights employee travel expense that does not comply with business policy. As approvers, managers can access this data from any place, discuss the matter with the employee in question, and get a quick resolution.
Controlled Spending Makes C-level Execs Happy
Implementing travel and expense management software helps keep the company’s spend under control. Low spends and high profits make every C-level executive happy. To top it off, it also makes them happy to make their employees happy while maintaining travel spend transparency.
Features of T&E Management Software That Make a Difference
Extracting important expense data from receipts by scanning
Option to submit expense reports via commonly used apps and text messages in a single click
A comprehensive view of a trip spend in a single, error-free report
Option to set up automated expense approval workflows
Quicker employee reimbursement turnaround time
Instant expense report submission notifications for prompt review
Bottom-line
Streamline your T&E process, tackle expense reporting challenges for traveling employees, and simplify expense tracking, approvals, and reimbursements using T&E management software. Empower your finance teams with complete visibility of travel spend to create a seamless automated expense management experience.
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Hospitality Management
Article | July 4, 2023
The travel industry is getting back to business, and demand has skyrocketed for travel technologies that make interactions possible between companies and corporate travelers. A recent Gartner survey reveals how 2020 affected CFOs with their corporate travel and expense management tasks globally.
How will finance teams report and forecast expenses? How can corporate travel costs be managed? How to manage travel expense management processes effortlessly? Does this sound familiar to you? These were a few valid questions that kept companies engaged in finding answers during the pandemic.
Many finance leaders want to implement proper corporate travel and expense management services and find solutions to bring consistency and clarity to their financial processes. While switching from manual processes to automated management systems can be difficult post-pandemic, with an efficient travel and expense management tool or software, your company can gain optimum benefits and stay productive in the future. This article will show you how it evolved through the coronavirus phase efficiently.
Adoption of T&E Management Process for Seamless Work Experience
An American Express survey found that 55% of the chief executives and senior financial managers ranked rising travel and expense costs as a top concern during the peak pandemic phase.
Digital transformation of your processes is a critical strategy for spend management, and it ensures that employees are using the right product to get the best value. By adopting an efficient travel and expense management tool, your company can gain stellar benefits for your finance team to cater varied requirements, and keep a rigorous control over corporate travel spend.
Before looking into how travel expense management processes are evolving post-pandemic, here are the benefits and value travel and expense management solutions offer. Also, this will further facilitate your finance team to manage the current corporate travel scenario effectively.
Benefits of Travel and Expense Management Solutions
The travel and expense management didn’t disappear during the pandemic. Instead, it accelerated its core value. The idea of integrating travel and expense management services with the help of big data in the travel industry is to leverage best practices for travel expense management that can help analyze and extract key information to diverse corporate travel finance functions.
Travel industry leaders who are integrating effective travel expense management services in their corporate travel system have experienced the following benefits:
Automatic processes of expenditure
Data-driven decisions are smarter
Time-saving mechanism
Simplifies budgeting
Ability to forecast more accurately
Delivers better user experience
Quick access to integrated data from expenditures
Gain deep data visibility
Higher rate of compliance with corporate policies in finance
These significant upticks will benefit your company and will simultaneously improve your corporate travel policies. Understanding these benefits will help you identify how travel technology can help your company manage complex financial tasks that arose during the pandemic.
According to a Gartner survey, a travel expense management system is essential as a key solution to manage the corporate travel economy. Any company, big or small, needs to control its expenditure to recover during the pandemic.
Complex Forms of T&E Management Are Gone
Legacy processes may get a job done, but they are more time consuming, error-prone, and do not provide visibility into travel spend. And when your travel and expense management process is slow and cumbersome, it can slow down the growth trajectory of your business.
Corporate travel and expense management automation and its associated features like corporate travel policy, quick and easy booking, automated expense and reimbursement solutions, live credit card feeds, backup analytics capabilities, and more have taken precedence post-pandemic. These services offer more visibility into the travel spend of your employees. With top travel and expense management solutions, your finance teams can monitor and control costs and expenses in the long run.
While many corporate travelers have started researching and organizing trips online, you need to add value to financial services by adopting automated travel and expense management solutions that work effortlessly.
Core Focus Areas of Travel and Expense Management
The post-pandemic era has seen a lot of companies embracing new and updated travel and expense management solutions to drive cost savings, and enable finance teams to have a better control over their road warriors. Here are some:
Contactless Data Record Is the next Big Thing
Travel and expense management systems allow employees to record all corporate travel bills and receipts through mobile apps and create expense reports immediately. Big data in the travel industry has played a significant role during the pandemic. Technology leaders have already experienced the benefits of travel and expense management.
For example, TripActions’ travel and expense management platform uses data to learn about business travelers’ preferences, and predicts within 30 seconds what travelers are going to book with 90% accuracy. The advantage of big data to travel and expense management has already organized several effortless finance processes for corporate travelers to experience seamless budgets.
Automation Is Crucial
Integrating travel and expense management solutions could easily add to the unimaginable overheads that companies are experiencing. Automation is one of these solutions. Its integration in the travel and expense management system will give rise to a paperless world that will facilitate finance functions to build an audit trail. With this, it also ensures total compliance to keep the organization and its process fast.
Agile Technology Is the Enabler
Critically for the travel industry, agile technology has allowed multiple methodologies for incremental development in corporate travels, which has transformed the processes from rigid to flexible. The agile process in corporate travel and expense management allows analyzing tangible results on expense. The approach also provides the potential to change plans according to the requirements.
For example, Lola.com, the agile travel management company is helping corporate travelers book, re-book, and take the task of expense reports off the table easily. Finance teams arrange travel policies in minutes and equally manage, control, and view expenditure effortlessly. In short, agile technology is making it much easier for travelers and companies all round.
To address the use of agile technology in travel and expense management, Jeanne Hopkins, former CMO at Lola.com, the agile travel management company shares
“Finance teams at Lola.com have tried managing, controlling, and got visibility into expenditures efficiently by implementing travel and expense management. Small and mid-sized businesses have to be fast and dynamic in the changing scenario of travel, so that actions like booking, re-booking, and managing corporate travel could be performed with efficiency and results in high productivity.”
A Hassle-free Expense Management System
Expense has been one common challenge with corporate travel programs. Integrating travel and expense management in your company can eventually introduce you to a hassle-free work solution. As the process involves collecting receipts from multiple sources, either from hotels, flights, or car rentals, travel and expense management solutions make it easier for a manager to look at all corporate travel costs at once. Also, in terms of future travel spend and potential savings, the capability of this management remains exceptional. Modern travel and expense management solutions also include self-service, real time, and easy navigation.
For example, for travelers, Lola.com has a large inventory of flights and hotels that allow users to avoid going to various sites to compare fares, and save preferences, loyalty programs, and provides payment options in one place. Traveler profiles are automatically stored so that users can book with one click. The 24/7 support team then ensures easy booking and re-booking for its users without any delay.
End-to-End Integration Is the New Order of Workforce
End-to-end integrated systems in your company will help your finance team implement best practices for travel expense management. This will make it easier for your employees to initiate, approve, and pay each transaction out of hundreds within minutes, thereby creating a seamless task without any manual involvement.
Travel and Expense Management Trends
When you automate your travel and expense process, it will not only maximize your returns but, at the same time, it will minimize your spending. This will save you both time and money. Below are the reasons you will want to consider making a switch to automate from a manual process.
Remove Guess Work from Expense Process
For finance personnel in your company, the new travel and expense management system can be set up in five minutes. One of the travel and expense management tools, like Expensify, helps with easy expense tracking and reporting. Similar to this, SpendCatcher – a mobile application of MobileXpense.com that is infused with AI and deep machine learning extracts payment information with just one tap.
Supplier-direct Bookings
Companies whose employees use a corporate travel and expense management system can receive reports according to department, employee, direct travel supplier, hotel, or car rental company. This information helps managers analyze spending patterns by actively monitoring it with up-to-date information in one flow from various travel suppliers.
In this case, Concur TripLink connects to corporate travelers for direct bookings across the borders. It gives visibility of bookings no matter where it is booked.
True Visibility into Spending
The corporate travel and expense report management system automatically flags and creates analyses of dashboards highlight hidden expenditure. This can be helpful to know:
How much expenditure is going in personal corporate travel cards, and why
Find expense categories easily
Find out why expense is falling short and ask for details
In this context, MasterCard International is rapidly approaching towards a smart, web-based expense management system to control spending, generate comprehensive spending reports, and accurately integrate purchase data. Thus, delivering business efficiently, quickly, and easily.
Rise of Bleisure Travel
Corporate travel and expense management also includes ‘bleisure travel’ for corporate travelers, those looking to combine business travel with leisure time. With agile travel and expense management tools, you can make quick changes in plans to keep your employees and finance team happy and productive while mapping the budget. In this case, Lola.com has made travel and expense management real by providing an effortless way to manage, book, and report on business plus leisure travel, by encouraging its employers to save most of their time and money.
Travel technology offers a deserving platform with travel and expense management to companies for added efficiency and visibility over travel spend. As corporate travel businesses are returning rapidly towards their regular work scenarios, the travel industry will see a rise in revenue. Travel and expense management system will be one of the powerful remedies to the travel industry and will increase its scope to drive growth post-pandemic.
According to the new Skift report, 88% of corporate travelers will drive travel technology company growth. 86% of corporate travel managers believe it. Put an end to complex budget management and legacy processes; it is time to know how to manage travel expenses in corporate.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is travel and expense process?
The aim of the travel and expense process is the complete administration of travel expenses, including the recording of expenses, posting in Financial Accounting (FI), and allocation in Controlling (CO) and Funds Management (FI-FM). The process also involves the valuation of costs associated with business-related activities.
Why is expense management important?
Expense management is important for businesses because it helps employees to keep an accurate track of expenses. This caters to them to plan financial aspects for the future with more clarity and confidence. Capital flow is a daily process in any business, so to manage some significant amounts could get efficiently done through expense management and generate a profit.
What is travel and expense management?
Travel and expense management is a process that includes finance management by the employee when on a business trip or any expense is made for business goals. Each travel and expense management consists of detailed records of costs, expenditure, budgeting, and report submission.
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Airlines and Airports
Article | July 12, 2022
Airports are embracing data and technology to improve the experience for both passengers and vendors. Such ‘smart airports’ where internet-connected devices control functions like thermostats and security using cloud-based technologies to enhance the consumer experience, are quickly becoming commonplace.
The Emergence of Smart Airports
Smart Airports were made to solve control and management problems that airports are having more and more of because of the number of people and goods that go through them. Because of this, experts from all over the world are focusing on smart airports, which use the latest developments in telecommunications, infrastructure, robotics, and the Internet of Things (IoT).
Advantages of Smart Airports
Real-time data improves operational efficiency.
Cost reduction, productivity improvement, and operational perfection.
Demand optimization through passenger flow control and entry automation.
Improved passenger handling, flight control, check-in, etc.
Biometric monitoring systems, advanced cyber security, and reliable operations and maintenance improve surveillance and security.
Better ground and health surveillance (cleaning frequencies, availability of amenities, etc.).
The Revenue Angle
A smart airport uses Wi-Fi access points as sensors to track passengers’ location and record their dwell times. With this data, the airport could place signs and ads where they would be seen. While landing travelers previously made few purchases, this airport placed signs for products they may want to buy before leaving where they would be seen. The result was increased sales for retailers and landside revenue for the airport operator. (Source: Deloitte Study)
Traveler’s & Airport Operations Experience
A traveler constantly interacts with technology systems and stakeholders during his journey through the airport. The smart airport systems influence the traveler’s safety, convenience, and overall experience at the airport. Operations like bag tracking, indoor navigation, in-store beacons, geo-fencing, queue analyzer, biometric screening, Wi-Fi passenger tracking, and building management systems are powered by IoT implementations that make an airport smart.
Creating a Smart Airport: The Checklist
A well-structured planning process can assist airport leaders in navigating all of the options and gaining confidence in achieving the airport's business objectives. The checklist includes the following steps:
Selecting an IoT solution that aligns with your business goals
Determine the organizational and technical abilities required to implement the solution
Craft a road map to address gaps between the required abilities and existing abilities
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