Manual ground travel management should be a thing of the past because the entire process can now be digitised. Digitising your travel processes means you gain more control over unmanaged spend.
You have better visibility over employee travel, and it becomes easier to spot employee travel patterns and locate cost-saving opportunities.
In short, digitised ground travel is more cost and time-effective than traditional, fragmented travel processes that may still be prevalent in your organisation.
The cost of manually managing your ground travel might surprise you. It’s only 5% of your travel spend but takes up 65% of your time and effort. Manually managing your ground travel is costing you $5 extra on each ride you take.
Now that you might be considering the pros of digitally enhanced travel, what parts of the process can you digitise? Here are four elements:
1. Digitising rider booking means an improved experience
- Making your entire ride booking process digital improves the traveller experience, of course. But it also enables the travel manager to view what bookings are made, where employees are travelling to and how frequently employees are travelling. Basically, it increases visibility in your organisation.
- Historically, booking a ride has been a fragmented process for most organisations. Even if you’ve started to adopt digital booking, the chances are that you’re employees are switching from one app to the next to locate the best ground travel option for their specific needs.
- Imagine if your travellers can open just one app and book and manage their entire journey through the same app? Booking through just one app and being able to choose from all your trusted suppliers in one place is the effortless solution you could benefit from. The ground travel experience is all of a sudden transformed for the traveller. Familiarity with one app grows, and ground travel is consistent and dependable for your employees no matter where they are in the world.
- Book on-demand or schedule your rides all in the same, user-friendly application. A seamless experience across web and mobile means that travellers and travel managers can track driver progress via smartphone or desktop.
- When switching to a digitally enhanced travel experience, you need confidence in the technology. That’s what an all-in-one ground travel platform is all about — instilling confidence for the travel management team and their riders.
2. Going digital means traveller tracking
- Duty of care is crucial when managing employee travel; those standards have to be met. With an all-in-one ground travel platform, you don’t have to rely on employees communicating when they’re travelling; you can analyse an intuitive dashboard to keep tabs on their whereabouts.
- Knowing where your employees are as they travel can reduce worry for both your management team and the employee themselves. Travelling around a foreign city can be stressful, but knowing you can reach out to them at any time to deliver critical information, can reduce this stress.
3. Unlock travel analytics to make smarter decisions
- It’s all about making more intelligent, better decisions. But you can’t make those decisions without being informed. A digital ground travel solution can give you all the information you need to make these smart decisions.
4. Automatic expense management saves time and money
Manual expensing is a complaint heard all too often when it comes to business travel. Not only is it painstakingly time-consuming, but it also leaves you open to fraudulent expense claims. You could be losing a lot of money through fraudulent expenses than you think.
- A study conducted by the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners found that expense reimbursement fraud is responsible for 21% of fraud in small businesses and 11% in large companies.
- Digitising your expense management process mitigates this fraud risk. An all-in-one solution means automatic expensing for all employees. This also makes the task of expensing less arduous for everyone involved — managers, financial controllers, and the operational teams in general.
- Automatic expensing saves valuable time for the organisation as a whole. 60% of workers fill out their expense claim forms at work, spending on average one hour per month on them, and admin teams spend 18 minutes on average correcting just one expense report.
A digital-first approach to your ground travel management could transform your organisation for the better.
Read next: Why your employees are booking out of travel policy (and how to fix it)
