The Essential Guide to Controlling Business Travel Costs
“Cost is a major factor for travel sourcing managers. The challenge for travel procurement is to balance cost control without negatively impacting the traveler experience or traveler safety.”
Corporate travel software and travelers
In fact, 50% of travelers surveyed in our GBTA survey said they prefer to book their business trips themselves, using an online booking tool. And the better information they have at just the right point in the booking flow, the more they can make the best decisions for themselves and their companies.
For travel managers, Deem is flexible. Travel managers have the ability to adjust policy controls as needed for any number of unique user types, to accommodate both travelers and their company’s financial goals in whatever economic conditions they find themselves in.
With Deem business travel software, travel managers get high adoption rates and compliance in a powerful corporate travel management tool that helps control costs. That makes their corporate finance teams happy, too.
See what Deem does to help your travelers be in control of their business trips while you remain in control of their costs.
1. Encourage savings
Travel and expense management is never easy. Prices for flights change continually and rapidly. To help you get the best prices despite airfare volatility, Deem uses Google ITA search for flights. ITA software was built specifically to address the issue of finding the best prices for flights.
Travelers are savvy shoppers when it comes to booking trips. Deem offers filters to help them shop smarter for their travel needs. Can they fly into any of the multiple airports in their destination city? Travel managers can determine whether alternate airports should be considered as part of the lowest fare measure.
Deem's custom alternate airports feature can make it even easier: If they need to be between two major cities, Deem can be configured to show flight options for both cities so travelers don’t have to do another search to compare flights and prices.
Or, can they add a stop on one or more segments? Travelers know these details can help them reduce costs and Deem has lots of ways to help them stay within your company’s budget.
- Technology-first: By making use of an easy, intuitive tool like Deem, companies save significantly by not having travelers need to call an agent for help, which can be much more expensive. Travelers can book and manage nearly everything about their trips themselves, through desktop or mobile devices.
- Pre-trip approvals: Travel managers can choose to make all trips actionable or only receive notifications on trips. Settings can be more or less restricted, helping manage trips in the way that best fits your needs.
- Policy controls: Deem’s flexibility means that policy controls can also be expanded or restricted as needed, using our single site builder functionality. Policy controls can vary by user type and even by route.
2. Maintain negotiated rates
Most travel managers are familiar with negotiating rates with suppliers to keep costs low. But being successful with obtaining and maintaining discounted rates requires some action on your part: you’ve got to have travelers adopt your company’s program and preferred partners. When they do, travel managers get better data and can negotiate better rates. Here’s how Deem helps:
- User experience: Deem was created using a human-centered design approach. This makes Deem intuitive to use, and as easy (or easier!) than many consumer apps travelers use in their personal lives. In fact, Deem routinely wins awards for its user experience. Because Deem feels familiar, looks beautiful, and is robust enough to book and manage even complex trips, travelers want to use Deem. So they’re happy to stay on platform.
- Content sources: Travel managers can provide travelers more options when they can include preferred vendors, Southwest Direct Access (SDA) and low-cost carriers, and Booking.com into their programs. So if travelers need that one hotel near corporate headquarters that’s only available through Booking.com, for example, they can still get there through Deem. It’s all in one platform for them.
- Policy indicators: Deem uses visual indicators to help guide travelers to stay in policy. These nudges include use of color, as in EcoCheck, where selecting a flight with fewer carbon emissions results in bright green and white images, or dull gray for flights with more CO2 emissions.
Visual indicators also include dynamic site messaging (DSM), a powerful and contextual way to identify the benefits of booking with preferred suppliers showing in their search results. If travelers select flights that aren’t in policy, Deem will identify that choice as out of policy and also recommend alternate options that are within policy.
3. Address travel loyalty programs
Travelers often want to book directly with suppliers so they can collect points to apply to upgrades. When travelers book directly your market share commitments are not met, even if travelers book your preferred airlines. This jeopardizes your ability to maintain or increase company discounts.
This can also mean travelers spend more than necessary when they book their travel. It can even drive them off platform entirely, costing travel managers visibility and control of spending.
But Deem stores all of your travelers’ loyalty memberships and applies them to trips. This makes it even easier for your team—they don’t have to search for long rewards numbers or worry about incorrect manual entries that might cost them points. Travelers always keep their rewards and travel managers get better compliance.
4. Recoup unused airline tickets
The pandemic caused a deluge of unused tickets. Airlines allowed companies to recover the cost, but companies can lose out when unused tickets are difficult to track. Enter Automatic Ticket Exchange in Deem.
Other platforms require travelers to call their TMC to use those credits. That typically translates into higher fares plus higher transaction fees. But Deem lets travelers know if they have unused tickets as they’re booking their trips and automatically applies the credit to the new trip only when it can be used for the new itinerary.
Travelers don’t have to make any extra effort and the company potentially saves millions of dollars per year.
Business travel software that makes it easier to travel anywhere.
5. Build fewer sites: Single Site Builder
Travel programs can get very complex and Deem’s competitors are built to make companies build and pay for separate sites around many different business rules, including user group/type, integrating unique content, policy, payment, messaging, custom fields, and more.
We believe travel technology should work for you and make your job as uncomplicated as possible. So, Deem’s site structure allows you to build everything on a single site. This means you’ll avoid the costly implementation and maintenance fees of supporting multiple, independent booking environments.
There are also rules that can be applied, so travelers can see only the lowest fares, or maybe preferred suppliers first. These controls and more are applied in one site, for any or all of your groups, and makes managing permissions for travelers simple and efficient. It helps keep more infrequent travelers from overbooking and over spending, while allowing different rules and spending caps for others, like VIPs and executives.
6. What does sustainability mean in technology?
Corporate finances are already being impacted by sustainability measures, leaving travel managers with even more new challenges, that is, both providing sustainable options for travelers as well as managing regulatory compliance as it keeps evolving. One of the best ways to optimize travel procurement is by “integrating sustainability and responsible sourcing metrics,” according to the IDC study.
That same report also shows that “more than 80% [of survey participants] feel that incorporating responsible source principles will have a significant impact on procurement, including travel content and travel service providers.”
So, how can travel managers balance sustainability goals with procurement goals? By starting with EcoCheck, the feature in the Deem travel management software that provides carbon emissions data where travelers need it most—right in the app as they’re booking trips.
For hotels, EcoCheck provides scores for both the location average and the selected hotel, as well as any eco-certifications from independent organizations the hotel may have. It also uses visual nudges to shape traveler behavior, with options that create lower emissions shown in green and other colors, but travel that is higher in emissions shown in gray. It’s a subtle but effective way to create more awareness and encourage more responsible traveler choices.
7. Increase adoption
Travelers prefer consumer booking platforms—they’re fast, intuitive to use, and consumers sometimes believe they can get better prices. They also see all trip results, with no one prioritizing suppliers or options based on unknown-to-them biases. But when travelers go off-platform, duty of care is harder or impossible to provide because you don’t know where travelers are.
This is why we made Deem a traveler-centric booking platform. When travelers get the information and features they need combined with the beautiful and intuitive platform they want, they have less reason to go off platform and travel managers get higher adoption rates.
Deem helps keep travelers in compliance, your budgets under control, and the joy in travel.
More Benefits
Integrate your travel management software with the expense platform your company needs
Track spending and improve forecasting
Minimize fraud
Maintain road warrior happiness with mobile-first and intuitive trip-booking technology
Make travel easier for everyone — Deem’s accessibility features meet the AA-level guidelines established by the Worldwide Web Consortium
Future-proof your corporate travel tech with the most innovative platform available
Recent awards at Deem
