Enjoy business travel on a budget

For seasoned corporate travellers, a business trip often means forthcoming jet lag, lonely hotel rooms and a view from someone else’s office window. But maintaining work-life balance, while travelling, is possible. And better yet, you can still stick to your travel budget.

Envy the jetsetting lifestyle of a corporate traveller? Think again. While business travellers might work the same hours abroad as they do at home, their down time is restricted by their location, away from family and friends. But business travel need not be completely devoted to work—actively or passively—as there are still ways to maintain work–life balance even when you’re miles away from your normal life.

The first step is to keep business travel stress free. This means planning well ahead and booking all the travel elements, such as flights and accommodation, as soon as you know what’s required from the trip. For events such as conferences or study tours where the timing is unlikely to change, you can make huge savings on inflexible, discount purchases.

Unfortunately it is a fact of business that plans do change, so consider paying a little extra for trips with variable timetables, such as meetings with clients. Paying for flexibility upfront may save you more in the long run.

“Our clients change itinerary, on average, two to three times a trip,” says Kim Wethmar, head of account management at travel management company Travelogic. “Corporate travel changes so rapidly that we are hesitant to prebook and prepay and preorganise three or four weeks in advance because we realise how quickly things change.”

A travel management company (TMC) is a good tool for businesses that don’t have the resources to make travel arrangements. A TMC manages business travel requirements, from flights and accommodation to visas, foreign exchange and insurance. The main benefit of a TMC is that neither you nor a member of your staff needs to juggle all the bookings as it all comes through one channel.

Al Laird, head of growth at Travelogic, says that although they charge a company for services, they access a number of discounts that clients cannot, often negating the fee. “Our corporate buying power is something that we can utilise on behalf of the clients that they, on their own spend, wouldn’t be able to get.”

In addition to timesaving and convenience, a TMC can monitor both staff and budget. “We play the duty of care role in terms of knowing where your travellers are and knowing what your corporate travel spend is,” says Laird. “We have a 24 hour service so the client can call at any time and we have the tools to deliver a cost-saving solution to clients because we build a company’s policy behind the scenes.”