Business Travel App Guide for Growing Companies

When a company is just starting out, managing business travel is often an afterthought. Employees book their own flights on consumer websites, pay with personal cards, and the process, while messy, is manageable. However, as your company grows, this unmanaged approach quickly becomes a major liability. A lack of visibility, uncontrolled spending, and a heavy administrative burden all point to a critical need: a dedicated business travel app.

A business travel app, as part of a larger travel management platform, is a specialized tool designed to bring control, efficiency, and safety to your company's travel program. For a growing company, implementing such a solution is a key step in professionalizing operations and laying a scalable foundation for the future. This guide will explain why a business travel app is so critical and what features you should look for.

Why Your Growing Company Needs a Business Travel App

1. To Control Costs and Gain Visibility

• The Problem: Without a central app, you have no real-time visibility into your travel spend. You only see the costs weeks later when expense reports are filed, making budgeting impossible.
• The Solution: A travel app consolidates all bookings into one place. It allows you to set and automate your travel policy, preventing out-of-policy spending before it happens and giving you a live dashboard of your T&E budget.

2. To Increase Productivity and Efficiency

• The Problem: Manual booking and expense reporting are a massive drain on employee time. Your team is spending valuable hours on administrative tasks instead of their core jobs.
• The Solution: A good app streamlines the entire process. It provides an intuitive, self-service booking tool that lets employees book compliant travel in minutes. The best apps also have integrated expense management, automating much of the reporting process.

3. To Fulfill Your Duty of Care

• The Problem: If your employees are booking on their own, you don't have a reliable way of knowing where they are in an emergency. This is a significant legal and moral risk.
• The Solution: By mandating that all travel is booked through the app, you create a central record of all itineraries. This allows you to instantly locate travelers in a crisis, a cornerstone of any modern travel risk management program.

Key Features to Look For in a Business Travel App

1. An Intuitive, Consumer-Grade User Experience This is non-negotiable. If the app isn't as easy to use as Expedia or Kayak, your employees won't use it. Low adoption is the number one killer of travel programs.

2. Integrated Travel and Expense Management The most efficient apps don't just handle booking; they handle the entire trip lifecycle. An app like Routespring automatically creates an expense report when a trip is booked and allows users to snap photos of on-trip receipts, making the entire process seamless.

3. Robust and Flexible Policy Controls The app must allow you to build your travel policy directly into the system. Look for features like:

• The ability to set advance booking rules.
• Dynamic hotel price caps.
• Custom approval workflows that can be routed to the right manager.

4. Centralized Payment Options A key feature for employee satisfaction is the ability to pay for travel with a central company card. This removes the burden of out-of-pocket spending from your employees, a major perk for a growing company.

5. 24/7 Human Support An app is great, but technology can't solve every problem. When a flight is canceled, your employees need access to expert human support. The best travel apps have 24/7 support from professional travel agents built right in.

For a growing company, moving from an unmanaged process to a dedicated business travel app is a critical step in scaling your operations. It provides the control, efficiency, and safety you need to manage your travel program like a professional, enterprise-level organization.

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Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

1. At what size does a company need a business travel app? There's no magic number, but if you have more than 10-15 employees who travel regularly, you will see a significant ROI from the efficiency and cost control a dedicated app provides.

2. Are business travel apps expensive? Not anymore. While legacy systems were very expensive, modern platforms offer affordable, scalable pricing. Many, including Routespring, have free starter plans that are perfect for small but growing companies.

3. How do we get our employees to use the app? Focus on the value it provides to them. A great user experience, combined with features like centralized payments that remove the need for them to use their own money, creates a powerful incentive for adoption.

4. What's the difference between a business travel app and just using a consumer app like Expedia? A consumer app offers no policy control, no centralized data, no approval workflows, and no way to track your travelers for safety. A business travel app is designed specifically to provide these essential corporate governance features.

5. How long does it take to set up a business travel app? With a modern, cloud-based platform, the setup is incredibly fast. You can typically get your policy configured, your users onboarded, and the system live in a matter of days or weeks, not the months required for older, legacy systems.