Operating a business that requires copious amounts of domestic and international travel can pose complex challenges.
Moving your employees around the country or the world opens you up to more complex issues you might not face if they were in the office or conducting virtual meetings and engagements.
However, avoiding business travel altogether is not always feasible, and the business faces challenges when this is required. Let’s take a look at some business travel challenges you need to address.
Challenge #1 Business Costs
In a post-pandemic world, costs are increasingly trending upwards, and as a business, you want to avoid being bankrupted by extensive business costs. While it’s not recommended to require employees to foot the bill to pay for their own expenses out of pocket, having an open tab to support business travel is not a great idea.
Reducing travel costs is a key strategy to manage your business’s financial health.
- Booking flights, for example, on cheaper days of the week or Red Eyes can be more cost-effective.
- Negotiating with travel companies can unlock further discounts.
- Have booking guidelines, i.e.; advance booking takes advantage of the preferred rates.
- Have company policies in place regarding approved company spending
- Use online tools and resources to discover cheaper travel options.
- Be flexible with travel dates.
- Track metrics to identify whether you’re getting a return on the investment, so you can look for alternative options if you’re not
Challenge #2 Meetings and Check-in Times Not Aligning
You can be as meticulous as you want regarding your bookings, but sometimes things don’t align, especially if you’re traversing time zones and need to meet clients’ working times.
This can mean that your employees or you might be left waiting around with luggage before meetings with no other options, or they might need a secure drop-off point when moving around a new city to lighten their load.
Identifying options, such as finding luggage storage in roma termini, can enable you to drop luggage in a secure location in Rome and get on with your day while you await hotel check-ins or departing transport options.
If working with vendors who can’t accommodate your schedule, i.e., early check-in or late checkout, isn’t possible, it might mean you need to compromise or add an extra cost you need to absorb to make things work for you.
Challenge #3 Traveller Safety
After all, the reason they are traveling is for your business. But ensuring the safety and wellbeing of employees when they’re not in the office can be a little bit more complex than it used to be.
You need to think about a wide range of different emergencies, from geopolitical tensions to medical issues, which then become the target of crime and natural disasters in the area they’re traveling in.
The more you know about the issues they can be facing, the easier it will be to put a support plan in place should the worst happen. It can be a great option to track your employees when they are traveling for business purposes, so if you need to provide help, you can directly help them exactly where they need it. You should also supply all travelers, especially those traveling internationally, with resources where they can get help, for example, your country’s embassy phone numbers or numbers for local police stations and emergency services, addresses, and contact numbers for any point of contact you have in their location, and for medical services, too.
Challenge #4 Wellbeing
Prioritizing travel wellbeing is crucial. The better travelers feel when traveling for purposes, the more impactful their travel will be. Factors that can be detrimental to their wellbeing include delays and cancellations, jet lag, and inability to access the food and drinks they would usually eat at home. They can also battle illnesses or even be homesick.
There are many factors that can impact your employees’ wellbeing when they are out and about. Letting them know what they can do in the event they can’t carry out their work duties, where they can get medical care if needed, and how they can relax and support their own wellbeing.
Challenge #5 Travel Disruptions
You should never underestimate the power that travel can hold over all of the best-laid plans. whether it’s severe weather, operational issues, strikes, etc. Your employees will still need to get to and from their destination, and all of these issues will massively impede their ability to do just this. This means you need to have contingency plans in place.
Whether you have a proactive incident management unit or are tracking travel options and situations in all the locations your employees are visiting, knowing precisely what they might encounter during their trip before they hit the ground will help you put contingency plans in place.
Challenge #7 Cyber Security
Cybersecurity for travelling should be absolutely paramount. When traveling, employees will work outside of the security of their office networks. This means that cyber threats are massively increased, as you are unable to control how they access data and the devices that they use.
The best way to overcome this is to equip employees with all the tools and technology they need to work safely when they leave the office. This means dedicated business devices that have access to a VPN and train them in the different ways they can become targets of cyber attacks when traveling.
Challenge #8 Bleisure
Bleisure is the combination of business and leisure in one trip. Many employees are finding ways to incorporate downtime into their business trips so they can take a mini-vacation and take care of business. Global spending in this sector is expected to reach $360 billion by 2027.
Having company policies regarding this activity can help you determine what is and isn’t acceptable and what you expect of employees when traveling. You might allow annual leave to be taken or days off to coincide with the trip so they can conduct business and still enjoy their time away; after all, you need to send them and bring them back. Plus, bleisure can help boost results, employee wellbeing, and satisfaction, improving retention and desirability for potential employees.
