8 Common Business Travel Challenges and How to Solve Them

Managing a corporate travel program is a complex balancing act. Travel managers and finance leaders are constantly juggling the need to control costs with the need to ensure their traveling employees are safe, productive, and satisfied. In today's dynamic global environment, this balancing act is fraught with challenges that can undermine a program's success, leading to budget overruns, administrative headaches, and burnt-out travelers.

The good news is that these challenges are not insurmountable. With a strategic approach and the right technology, you can overcome these common hurdles and build a travel program that is resilient, efficient, and cost-effective. This guide breaks down the top 8 challenges in business travel and provides practical, proven solutions for each.

1. The Challenge: Rising Costs and Lack of Budget Control

• The Problem: Inflation, high demand, and volatile fuel prices have led to a significant increase in the cost of flights and hotels. Without a system for proactive control, T&E budgets can quickly spiral out of control.
• The Solution: You need to implement a modern travel management platform with an automated policy engine. This is the most effective way to reduce costs strategically.
  • Automate Advance Booking: Mandate a 14-21 day advance booking policy for flights. The platform should automatically flag last-minute bookings and require a higher level of approval. This is the single most powerful cost-saving lever.
  • Use Dynamic Hotel Caps: Implement realistic, market-based price caps for hotels that are enforced by the booking tool.
  • Gain Real-Time Visibility: Use a platform with a live analytics dashboard to track your spend against budget in real time, not weeks after the fact.

2. The Challenge: Low Policy Compliance and "Rogue" Bookings

• The Problem: Employees find the official corporate booking tool to be clunky, frustrating, or lacking in options. They get frustrated and book their travel on public consumer websites like Expedia or Kayak. This "rogue booking" means you lose all visibility, policy control, and Duty of Care oversight.
• The Solution: You have to win the hearts and minds of your travelers by providing a superior experience.
  • A Consumer-Grade User Experience: Your official booking tool must be as fast, clean, and intuitive as the best consumer travel sites. If it's not a pleasure to use, it won't be used.
  • Comprehensive Inventory: The platform must aggregate travel options from a wide variety of sources to ensure your travelers have access to a competitive range of choices.
  • Centralized Payments: This is a key incentive. When the company pays for flights and hotels directly, it removes the financial burden and reimbursement hassle from the employee, making the official platform the most attractive option.

3. The Challenge: The Administrative Burden of Manual Processes

• The Problem: Manual booking requests, email-based approvals, and spreadsheet-based expense reports consume a massive amount of productive time from your travelers, their managers, and your finance team.
• The Solution: Automate the entire end-to-end workflow with a unified travel and expense platform.
  • Empower Self-Booking: Allow employees to book their own travel within the automated policy guardrails of your platform.
  • Automate Approvals: Use a system with mobile-friendly, one-click approval workflows to reduce the approval time from days to minutes.
  • Automate Expense Creation: The most efficient platforms, like Routespring, automatically create the expense report when a trip is booked, eliminating the need for manual data entry for the largest travel costs.

4. The Challenge: Inadequate Duty of Care and Risk Management

• The Problem: In an increasingly uncertain world, companies have a legal and moral obligation to protect their traveling employees. Many companies lack a robust system to locate, communicate with, and assist their travelers in an emergency.
• The Solution: A modern Travel Risk Management (TRM) program is essential.
  • Mandate a Central Booking Platform: This is the only way to reliably track traveler locations in real time.
  • Integrate Risk Intelligence: The platform should provide automated pre-trip advisories and real-time risk alerts.
  • Provide a 24/7 Emergency Hotline: Travelers must have one-tap access to a professional medical and security assistance provider who can handle any on-trip crisis.

5. The Challenge: Traveler Burnout and Dissatisfaction

• The Problem: A travel program that is overly restrictive, stressful, and inconvenient can lead to employee burnout and turnover, especially among your most valuable frequent travelers.
• The Solution: Prioritize the traveler experience.
  • Design a Fair and Flexible Policy: A policy that allows for a direct flight that saves a traveler hours of time, or supports "bleisure" travel, shows that you value your employees' well-being.
  • Provide World-Class Support: Knowing that a professional travel agent is available 24/7 to help with a flight cancellation provides invaluable peace of mind.

6. The Challenge: Managing Travel for Non-Employees

• The Problem: Travel for interview candidates, consultants, or contractors is often managed in an ad-hoc, chaotic way, leading to a poor guest experience and a lack of cost control.
• The Solution: Your travel platform should have a "guest booking" or "travel arranger" feature. This allows a designated internal coordinator to book travel on behalf of the non-employee, using a central payment method and applying a specific guest travel policy. This provides a professional experience while maintaining control.

7. The Challenge: Managing Group and Team Travel

• The Problem: Coordinating travel for a team offsite or company retreat is a massive logistical headache that cannot be managed on spreadsheets.
• The Solution: Use a platform with dedicated group travel management features. This allows a planner to create an event-specific policy and budget, and then invite attendees to book their own compliant travel, with all the data automatically consolidated.

8. The Challenge: Lack of Actionable Data and Analytics

• The Problem: Without a centralized system, travel data is fragmented and out of date, making strategic analysis impossible.
• The Solution: A unified platform provides a real-time analytics dashboard. This allows you to track spending against budgets, monitor policy compliance, and, crucially, gather the consolidated supplier data you need to negotiate better corporate rates.

Overcoming the challenges of modern business travel is not about working harder; it's about working smarter. By implementing a modern, integrated travel management platform, you can gain the control, efficiency, and visibility needed to build a world-class travel program that is a true strategic asset to your business.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. What is the single biggest challenge in business travel today? For most companies, the biggest challenge is the lack of real-time visibility and control over spending. This single problem is the root cause of many others, including budget overruns and an inability to enforce policy. This is why centralizing all travel onto a single platform is the most critical first step.

2. How can we reduce travel costs without simply stopping all travel? The key is to focus on smart savings. The most effective strategies are to enforce advance booking policies, automate the recovery of unused flight credits, and negotiate preferred rates with suppliers. These three tactics alone can reduce travel spend by 15-25% without reducing the amount of travel.

3. Our employees complain that our booking tool is hard to use. How do we fix this? This is a major red flag that will lead to low compliance. You must prioritize the traveler experience. If your current tool is not user-friendly, you should seriously consider switching to a modern platform with a clean, intuitive, consumer-grade interface.

4. How has remote work changed the challenges of business travel? Remote work has shifted the purpose of travel. There is now a much greater emphasis on internal travel for team-building and collaboration. This has made the challenge of managing complex group travel logistics a much higher priority for many companies.

5. How do we get started with building a proper Travel Risk Management (TRM) program? The first step is to consolidate all your bookings onto a single platform to enable traveler tracking. The second step is to partner with a TMC that can provide you with integrated risk intelligence feeds and access to a 24/7 medical and security assistance provider.