Reducing Operational Costs by Optimizing Employee Travel Spend

Juliann Pless of CSI discusses how electronic travel payments add spending transparency

By Ashley Wells    May 29, 2018    

PARTNER CONTENT

According to this year's Global Business Travel Forecast, 2018 is expected to be an impressive year for corporate travel. No one knows better what that can mean for marketing procurement teams that ultimately want to reduce operational budgets and boost media buying than Juliann Pless, SVP of travel solutions at Corporate Spending Innovations (CSI).

There are a lot of challenges that can come with corporate travel, Pless notes. Creating transparency, from reservations to daily expenses, can be the key to a successful travel program that contributes to budgeting goals.

As part of the ANA Thought Leadership Program, of which CSI is a partner, Pless discusses corporate travel and the bigger picture of how electronic payments can optimize planning, employee travel spend, and operations budgets.

 

Q. What are some of the biggest challenges you see in corporate travel that can impact operational budgets?

Companies are experiencing security breaches at alarming rates, which means employee fraud, policy compliance, and accurate data collection have become serious concerns. Many of these challenges arise when open travel-booking arrangements are used and employees are given control of reservation details without accountability for spending.

By implementing the right technologies, companies and their travel managers take back the control and innately protect themselves from fraud and non-compliance. The goal is to gain full visibility into the travel program including what, where, and how much employees are spending so you can reconcile each trip down to the penny by client or project. This level of transparency and real-time control, in addition to savings and efficiencies associated with automating manual processes, is essential for maximizing operational budgets.

 

Q. Travel expenses can add up quickly. How do electronic payments create transparency into employee spending that lets marketers know exactly where their money is going?

The technologies offered today around electronic payments allow managers to approve or decline travel spending in real time. Settings can be predetermined with varying levels of flexibility based on the type of trip, or which client or campaign a trip is for.

Electronic payments also provide invoice-level detail and data on every transaction. This can include detailed accounting fields, employee numbers, and custom data points specific to a campaign or client. This level of detail and the automation behind it supports expedited reconciliations that can transform the process of expensing.

 

Q. How can virtual credit cards in particular optimize traveler spending and overall budgets?

Like anything in business, managers want to ensure the marketing organization gets the most for its money and that should apply to travel expenses as well. Virtual credit cards are created for a specific single use, which means once it has been used for its intended purpose the number can't be used again. That eliminates the temptation for employees to upgrade their airline tickets at the last minute or add hotel incidentals to their bill at checkout. Most managed travel programs also include contracted discount rates with vendors that accept virtual credit cards. This ensures travelers are getting the best deal possible with the added safeguard against unapproved spending.

 

Q. The concept of virtual credit cards is still foreign to some people and there are concerns about the security of more modern payment methods coming on the scene. Do the benefits outweigh the risks?

More and more, people are doing their homework and developing an educated understanding of what virtual credit cards are, how they work, and the benefits they offer. Virtual credit cards reinforce compliance policies, streamline reconciliations, save time on manual processing, and actually eliminate the opportunity for fraud and data breaches. Security concerns essentially don't exist, which means the benefits of virtual cards far outweigh any perceived risks.

Ashley Wells is a content manager at Corporate Spending Innovations.