Does Your Company Understand Your Travel Needs, Business Traveler?

Skift, the travel media and information company, is working on a big editorial initiative aimed at understanding what global business travelers really want from their travel experience, and ultimately from the travel industry.

The main goal: To identify the difference between what modern savvy travelers wants and what the industry thinks they want.

As part of this initiative, we are asking the LinkedIn’s global community of business travelers to share insights and opinions from being on the front lines of their travel experience.

First and foremost, we want to hear about your frustrations, challenges, and preferences when it comes to business travel.

How can your company improve its travel policy to balance your needs with the company needs? Reining in travel costs is a top priority for many employers. But the policies aimed at reaching these objectives can often conflict with individual preferences, especially when it comes to flexibility in booking the accommodations and flights that work best for your specific business objectives.

Preferred partnerships with corporate travel agencies and limitations placed on employees and the hotel properties that they can book might save the company on direct costs such as room rates, but that same lack of flexibility doesn’t take into account the hidden costs. Racking up additional expenses for taxis back and forth from client sites to that airport hotel may not be the most efficient way to spend company dollars.

Often times business travelers complain about the desire and willingness to save their employers money by booking their own travel and accommodations, but end up being pigeonholed into offerings that must match corporate travel policy.

While this controlled approach gives companies the ability to track spend, it also underestimates employee good judgment and motivations for booking certain types of accommodations, flights and other transport methods. Numerous corporate travel startups are looking for ways to help bridge that gap, building smart platforms aimed at incentivizing business travelers to actively look for travel deals on behalf of their employers.

The company that wants to track your travel spend down to the last penny can also create inefficiencies when it comes to the relative cost of business travel. With the rise of Airbnb (now aggressively going after the business traveler) employees have accommodations options beyond the traditional hotel room. Often times (particularly in certain markets), these alternatives can weigh in well below the going rate for hotels.

For leisure travelers, these platforms are now commonplace, offering prices and inventory well beyond what is available through traditional channels. Often times these properties are also located in urban centers or zones much closer to where business travelers need to be. For business travelers with restricted corporate travel policies, these more economical options are off the table. Road warriors also often need to work within the confines of managed travel booking platforms that limit the inventory available to them.  Keeping employees contained within the managed travel ecosystem helps companies track spend and look for additional savings – but to what effect?

What many companies are now asking themselves is how much they should empower their employees to make budget-conscious decisions when on the road. Often times, employees prefer to book their business travel through the same channels that they book their leisure travel.

In many ways, managed travel platforms have been slow to evolve.  Today’s do-it-yourself travel planning and booking mentality is incongruent with older more traditional methods.  Picking up the phone and dealing with travel agents can sometimes be more time consuming than beneficial – for example.

So where are your pain points? Does your company’s travel policy keep you from doing your job? Do you find yourself limited by the confines of corporate travel managers and booking platforms? What can your employer do differently to save everyone both time and money?

Let us know in the comments below.

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Rafat Ali is the CEO and founder of Skift, the NYC-based travel intelligence company focused on global travel industry: News, info, data and analysis on airlines, hotels, tourism, cruises, startups, tech and more. You can follow Skift here on LinkedIn, or Twitter or Facebook.

Previously, he was the founder of paidContent, which he sold to Guardian Media Group in 2008.