Many organisations are taking control of who now books employee travel – especially plane travel, where large number of bookings offer two benefits – for every 10 tickets booked, get one free and the other where Airmiles can be used to make free bookings. Managed and properly controlled, these can reduce air travel and travel cost by as much as 13%.
Instead of allowing employees to book tickets, companies are using specialist travel management companies (TMCs) to book travel for employees. This centralises travel, ensuring company travel policy is adhered to and bulk discounts are obtained. However, this approach raises some questions:
- How do you track who is travelling?
- Who authorises travel?
- Do employees actually travel or are tickets cancelled?
A new scam that equates to nothing less than expenses fraud has
developed. Employees change the ticket to a different routing to accommodate a
holiday, or exchange one business class ticket for two economy tickets. In both
instances, the organisation is losing out.
As part of our product development road map, Expense On Demand’s newly rolled out travel booking feature with integrated pre-approval helps make organising, approving and signing off business travel a much easier process, and helps prevent travel fraud.
Travel Booking manages all travel requests in an integrated module (no extra charge!) that comes as standard for all Expense On Demand customers. It provides a secure interface allowing authorised travel agents to access the system.
Pre-approval lets claimants request pre-approval, enabling better cost control and preventing disagreements over costs by allowing sign-off by line managers before travel.
The module allows greater control over agents by selecting preferred suppliers for different elements such as flights or hotels if required, allowing you to automatically source travel requirements from the best one for your needs.
Requests are sent to travel agents for processing and confirmed bookings are entered by travel agents into employee expenses claims, saving employee and back office processing.
A summary of the main features and benefits of organising Travel Booking with Expense On Demand:
- Every booking requires pre-authorisation
- Tickets are automatically e-mailed to the employee and uploaded into Expense On Demand for audit purposes
- Every cancellation requires management authorisation
- Re-bookings, instead of cancellations are handled and monitored with equal ease
- Every travel that is ‘completed’ is validated against airline booking systems by the TMC to ensure that travel ‘actually’ occurred to the original destination and for the intended purpose
- All bookings are tracked – who is travelling, where and when – which airlines are frequented, together with routes
- Every booking, every cancellation and its charge can be monitored in real time, with reconciliation at the ‘click of a button’
- Most importantly, the organisation can monitor and ensure it makes the most of free ticket entitlements and the benefits of Airmiles
We are offering this function free of charge to ALL our existing customers for the next 6 months.
