As technology improves, many businesses are finding that using an Online Booking Tool to book business trips can bring many benefits to their business. Having the flexibility to simultaneously search for flights, rail and hotels, all within the control of a company travel policy is a perfect way to drive efficiencies in the business travel booking process.

All of this whilst working in complete harmony with a dedicated travel team provides a complete travel solution. The benefits of using an online booking tool are wide ranging from changing behaviours to controlling costs. Regardless of your objectives your TMC will help you achieve them.

Visual Guilt

Visual guilt is a great way of influencing bookers to buy more cost effectively without the need to have complex travel policy rules, and will in turn, drive actual cost savings at booking level.

Increasing Adoption 

Simplicity is often the key to successful adoption and will also have the most positive impact on your implementation timeframes.

Increasing Compliance 

Mobile App based OBT’s give you and your travellers the option to research and book trips wherever and whenever, and with Approval Process’s also built into the booking tool, it means your designated approvers can give their go-ahead to trips without needing to log into a computer.

Profile Management

Users of an OBT can keep Traveller Profiles updated in real-time adding in travel preferences such as seating requirements or any special dietary requirements.

Hotel Caps 

The introduction of rate caps on both a national and regional basis can prove a very savvy tactic to control hotel spend. The rate caps can be used as a benchmark against previous average rates, or versus projected hotel industry forecasts.

Policy within the Tool

To ensure your travel policy continues to meet your objectives; you need to let it evolve when it needs to. Managing and reducing business travel costs is of course very important but it’s also important to manage and reduce traveller risk as well as keeping an eye on traveller wellbeing. It also needs to include out of policy requests.

Fully Flexible to your requirements

The great thing about today’s online booking tools is that they are super flexible and can be tailored to your specific needs and policy. During your implementation process, your TMC will consult with you on your different booker group’s (e.g. self-book, book for others, super booker) and what can and can’t be booked by each of these. This means you can have multiple travel policies all operating at the same time within the tool, and these can be easily changed at a moment’s notice by speaking with your contact within the TMC.

As well as managing your policy, OBT’s have the ability to include an Approval Process. That could be for all bookings, or bookings that fall out of your policy, the choice is down to you and your own preferences to how this would be set up.

Save and book in your own time.

Sometimes it’s easier to just jump online and book travel yourself for those simple trips where a dedicated booking team isn’t needed, so for those instances, an OBT gives you and your travellers the flexibility to log in, research and book flights at a time convenient to yourselves. Whether it be researching options on the App on your journey to work, or in the evenings in the comfort of your own home, an OBT can work around your schedule and save you time in the process.

Fully Loaded with Content

Gone are the days when OBT’s had limited flight and hotel rates loaded into them.
With the latest booking tools, TMC’s can pull in content from a huge range of avenues. Whether it’s British Airways ‘New Distribution Capability’ (NDC) fares, or bed banks such as Totalstay, Bedsonline and Premier Inn/Travelodge, you can now rest assured you are getting the same prices’ you or your travellers would see online. This gives your travellers peace of mind they are getting the best deals for their trips and will increase your company’s online booking adoption.

Centralise your travel to a single provider

As an Online Booking Tool is able to book all aspects of travel (Flights, Hotels, Car Hire, Trains etc) this means all of the company travel can be booked in the same place, using the same process each time which means adoption of the solution reaches a high level very quickly after implementation. By having all the travel booked in one place, the MI data offered by your TMC will be fully comprehensive making it much easier to analyse spend, policy compliance and booking practices to continuously improve your travel programme.

Mobile App

Perhaps the crowning jewel in this list of benefits, as we start the new decade a Mobile Booking App is the must-have item for any company thinking about moving their travel programme to an OBT. The booking App gives you and your travellers the option to research and book trips wherever and whenever, and with Approval Process’s also built into the booking tool, it means your designated approvers can give their go-ahead to trips without needing to log into a computer. Happy Travel managers, h-app-y travellers!

Bespoke Data Label Capture

Every company has different invoice requirements, and with an OBT being able to capture multiple data labels of your choice (cost codes, PO Numbers, reason codes… to name a few) you can ensure your invoices have all the information needed to make your accounts team’s lives easier