Gill Upton
Editor, The Business Travel Magazine
Keeping the business traveller happy and comfortable whilst sticking to tight budgets and ensuring the travellers’ safety — the role of the business travel manager is a difficult one.
Gill Upton, Editor, The Business Travel Magazine, offers her top tips to the business travel manager and the business traveller.
Top tips for business travel managers
1. Expand into managing meetings: The savings on business travel are almost exhausted, but you can make big savings bringing your professional skills to organising office meetings.
2. Get an understanding of Big Data: Knowledge is power, and big data provides unique insights.
3. Communicate with other stakeholders, including procurement, finance, HR and IT.
4. Get a handle on changing demographics: the millennials are coming!
Top tips for business travellers
1. Keep to the programme! Your business travel manager has negotiated deals with suppliers that not only save your employer money but that also ensure your safety. The cheaper deal you found may place you in a dodgy part of town, use more carbon or take longer.
2. If your business travel trip is not revenue-producing then always consider taking the meeting virtually, with a conference call or utilising telepresence, for example.
3. On revenue-producing trips, consider length of trip as well as the number of business travellers in order to cut costs. Changing the time of day the meeting is held may affect a less expensive train or air journey or eradicate the need for an overnight stay, for example.
4. Don’t resist change but embrace it! Your employer is making changes to the way you travel to benefit you and ensure your wellbeing.