If This Was a Game, You’d be Winning

Remember playing hide-and-seek with your little brother? He’d sneak into the broom closet every single time, and you’d have to act like you couldn’t find him, just so the game would last longer. It wasn’t even any fun for you because you always knew where he was.  

It’s not quite that simple as a travel manager, and it certainly isn’t a game. When your travelers book trips directly with suppliers (circumventing your travel program), they are, in essence, hiding from you. They’re hiding their destination, they’re hiding their itinerary, they’re hiding their spending – not on purpose, perhaps, but it doesn’t matter. You can’t find them, and if they run into trouble, you can’t protect them.  

And that’s far more expensive than the hidden spend you can’t control.  

Doing your duty of care depends on knowing where your travelers are and where they’re headed next. So does doing your day-to-day job of managing their travel and your companies’ travel spending. You simply can’t do it if you can’t see their bookings.  

So why can’t you just ask them to book within your system and through your preferred suppliers? Of course, you have already asked them to follow the rules. You’ve created reams of policy to try to guide them to use your corporate booking tool. But in the end, they want options and flexibility. They want control over their own plans.  

So you get stuck trying to police them instead of focusing on the more important work of building your travel program.  

But what if – and this isn’t that big of an if – what if you could simply plug in a tool that captures every booking your travelers make, inside and outside of your booking program? “C’mon,” you’re saying to yourself. “A tool like that doesn’t exists.”  

Well, no. It actually exists, and it’s remarkably simple.  

In this simple summary, we lay out a compelling argument for Concur® TripLink – our tool that connects you to a global network of suppliers, so you can see where trips are being booked. And if your travelers should go outside that network to get the trip they want, they can use TripIt – packaged with Concur TripLink – and forward the details to plans@tripit, so everything gets uploaded into your SAP Concur system. Automatically.  

You get visibility into traveler reservations across booking channels, so you can see every itinerary detail anywhere in the world.  

It’s like knowing your little brother is in the broom closet, but instead of simply finding him, you discover lower costs through corporate discounts; increased traveler safety by fulfilling security responsibilities; improved productivity because your travelers are happier; and finally, you find compliance on both corporate and regulatory levels. And those are all good finds.  

Sure, travel management isn’t a game, but if you have the right tools, you can definitely win. If you want to keep looking and discover even more, check out this Fusion webinar for all the facts.