Travel Policy Applications and Uses
A travel policy is essential to guide employee behavior while traveling on company business
Travel policy application and uses are important to a company's bottom line. Air travel, car rental and hotel nights can add up quickly. The perfect travel policy eliminates ambiguity when employees book a trip.A sensible place to start is outlining when business travel is warranted. Is travel allowed for internal meetings, for sales calls, for customer visits, for trade shows, for training, for vendor meetings or to help scout venues that your executives might visit soon? Sometimes companies host larger seminars that require employees from around the country or around the world to gather face-to-face. Such trips can go way over budget unless a travel policy is clearly written and consistently enforced.
1. Decide when travel is warranted and under what conditions employees should hit the road.
2. Build relationships with hotels, airlines, car rental agencies, and restaurants to generate volume discounts.
3. Insist that employees follow the travel policy, gain buy-in from the executive level and enforce the travel policy applications and uses.
Build a travel policy that fits your business usage
The foundation of a successful travel policy is that it be consistent with the company culture. If your business is focused on superior customer service, you need to incorporate a travel policy that applies.
Try: Use a template from a company like HR Policy Answers. This company gives information on different applications and uses for a business travel policy, including travel rewards, tax implications, customer service travel and new business set-up travel. Templates like this will ensure that your policy touches all the bases. Once you have the basics down then figure out how you want to present yourself to employees and stakeholders through your travel policy. You can do that through the Framing a Travel Strategy website. Understanding what your travel policy says about your company is essential.
Apply your travel policy by building a network
Frequent customers get the best deal everywhere from the grocery store to the airport, so building partner relationships throughout the travel industry will help your company. Credit card companies are another avenue to build volume discounts. The more your employees use a card the greater the benefit to your company.
Try: Work the phones and the emails to gain usage contracts with travel companies. You can visit Management Travel News to learn more about how travel policy managers are working with discount service providers. Then, check out a case study at J.P. Morgan regarding how Moen was able to use a corporate credit card strategy to its advantage.
Earn employee buy-in and executive support to ensure the ultimate success of your travel policy
If your executives don't support the travel plan and employees don't follow it, you will wind up with a toothless document not worth the paper on which it is written. Company expenses will rise, and your prestige within the organization will suffer.
Try: Procurement Travel News has an excellent article on how Fortune 1000 companies build effective travel policies. See a public sector example of a travel policy and it's applications and uses from New Mexico State University, a well run and highly respected institution in that state.
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