Even with the best automated travel policy, there will always be times that trips outside of your policy have to be approved. But just because they’re outside of policy doesn’t mean they can’t be managed. In fact, by tracking compliance issues and trends you can very easily make decisions that drive more value from your travel management.
Compliance is affected by:
Traveler opinion of the approved booking platform
Travel options provided by the approved booking platform
Accuracy and of the travel policy in terms of costs
Realism of the travel policy in terms of departmental and location differences
Amount of advance notice for a trip
Because of this, you can’t just look at trips that fall outside of your policy. You need to detect other issues and trends. Here are various metrics you might want to review quarterly or twice per year to measure and optimize compliance.
| Metrics | What to measure | Why should you review it? | How to collect the data |
|---|---|---|---|
| Spend for a specific date range | Company wide travel spend across all departments for a set date range. | Track budgets and make data-driven decisions in the moment about what trips to approve. If your finance team knows what has already been spent each quarter, they can make adjustments to keep annual expenses on target. | Use a business travel platform that has an integrated expensing system, so that you can generate reports for company-wide travel spend. |
| Total spend by project or team | Travel spend for a certain team or use (also within a date range). | See whether individual teams and projects are within their budget. | Use a business travel platform that allows you to set up cost centers as well as assign tags, categories and labels to trips. |
| Average trip spend by project or team | Calculate the average spend on each trip, within a certain team or department, or for a certain person. | Identify projects or teams with larger-than-average spend per trip and determine whether the routine levels of high spend is warranted. It may be that a team always has short notice for trips due to client emergencies, in which case it may not be possible to cut cost. | Purchase travel with a platform or third-party vendor that offers advanced reporting |
| Policy compliance by team or person | The amount of travel booked outside of policy (but within the approved channel), in terms of number of trips and spend— analyzed by subsets. | A company culture of trust is essential. Still, for large organizations, there is often a need to identify repeat policy offenders so that you can ask them the cause and make any needed adjustments. | Use a business travel platform that includes built-in travel policies and approval procedures to control travel. Improve in-house compliance rates, and ensure smooth and risk-free travel. |
| Policy compliance with booking channel and payment method | The amount of travel, in terms of spend and number of trips, booked outside of the approved platform and/or with an unapproved payment method. | If there’s a high amount of travel taking place outside of the approved platform (15% or more), it is definitely worth discovering the reason. Bringing travel into one approved platform makes all analysis far easier. The remedy might be to update your policies and approvals or to switch to a more travelfriendly platform with better options. | Use a business travel platform that allows you to set up cost centers as well as assign tags, categories and labels to trips. |
| How far trips are booked in advance | The average amount of days that trips are booked in advance, within the entire organization or for certain subsets. | Booking in advance is proven to save money on travel. With business travel, it’s often hard to get advance notice. However, some travelers procrastinate booking trips that they’re aware of because of their other day-to-day priorities. It’s important to discover whether this is a problem for your team. If it is, ask travel budget owners to give their travelers deadlines for booking their upcoming trips. | Most travel platforms will likely not have this report readily available in the dashboard. That’s why it’s essential to partner with a platform or vendor that will send you advanced reports upon request. |
| Percentage of modifications | The percentage of trip modifications or cancellations within a certain date range, and by department or team. | With business travel there are many factors that can result in changes that are not anyone’s fault. Identifying your cancelation and modification rate can help you determine whether or not you need to explore the issue further. If this number is below 15%, you likely don’t need to dig into causes. But if it’s above, you need to look at investing in flexible fares. | Use a tool that will give you flexibility when making these changes, and that will enable you to track all modifications. |
| Cost of providing travel support | The total cost of providing support to travelers for the given date range, whether that cost be for internal administrative hours or an external vendor. | Most TMCs and corporate travel providers charge per support phone call which can quickly rack up a big expense. Meanwhile, most business travel platforms provide round-the clock support at a flat rate. | If you use an external vendor, they should itemize their invoice to you, making it easy to see what was spent on support calls versus flight and hotel costs. If you’re providing support in house with travel managers and office managers, you’ll need to survey the admin team to discover how many hours they devote to travel support. |