You can’t run a business from a single office. Yeah, you can’t. Even in a world that just saw a pandemic and the boom of virtual meetings, traveling for business purposes has never stopped. It halted a little, but never went out of fashion.
A meeting here and another there, that’s what makes you leave your office and travel via roads or even fly to meet your clientele. And, while you are on the move, attending conferences, meetings, or securing deals, do you know what’s the most important thing that is enabling you to do so? What is it that is assisting you in keeping everything organized?
The technology. Yes, your mobile phone, the laptop, and the applications in them make sure that your travel schedule is being followed. These apps on your phone make sure that you don’t miss out on anything and that’s why they keep you notified even in the middle of the night.
And, guess what, the tech behind these apps is evolving and changing the professionals execute their corporate trips. Want to know how exactly? Let’s do it.
What Exactly are Business Travel Apps?
Business travel apps are mainly used by entrepreneurs, employees, and business owners who are an integral part of the corporate world. These apps, which mainly operate via mobile phones, allow their users to manage their travel schedule, book flights, book meetings, look for accommodations to stay, and even manage travel expenses.
Business travel apps operate with one goal on their agenda, making things easier for people who travel for business purposes. No hassle and pure convenience are what they strive for, which they do by providing specialized features in their corporate apps.
Business Travel Apps and Their Key Features
There are many of them, like:
1. These Apps Allow Travel Bookings and Itinerary Management
When traveling, booking hotels, flights, and renting cars is always a hassle. We don’t know whether we will get the best accommodation or not, flight at a good fare price or not, or can we rent cars at the location where we are going. All these doubts make business travel a little complicated.
But with travel apps, these complicated things can be simplified. Good fare prices, great accommodation suggestions, best travel rewards programs, and complete info about any location you are visiting, all of it is available on travel apps. Just set your preferences, what you need and what not, everything you want will pop in right front of you.
2. Reporting and Tracking of Travel Expenses
Expenses are something to be wary of while traveling and it becomes even more important when you are traveling for business purposes. After all, everything has to be reported at the end of the year.
To make sure everything is in check, reported, and tracked, business travel applications are a good way to go. With them at your disposal, you can easily generate expense reports, get receipts, and even categorize the expenses according to your preferences.
3. They Allow You to Stay in Compliance with Travel Policies
This might be one of the best features of business travel apps. As we all know staying in compliance and remaining under the light of rules and regulations is always a daunting thing to do, these apps make it easier to handle.
When it comes to travel compliance, the policies are endless, and creating guidelines for the same can be a hard thing to do. These apps have the feature to integrate all these policies and reflect all the guidelines in one place, thus making it easier for companies to stay compliant.
4. Travel Apps are Good at Sending Travel Alerts and Updates
You don’t want to miss out on a flight or be late for client meetings, right? Well, you won’t be if you have business travel applications by your side. These apps are special when it comes to keeping things in check.
If you have entered all the data related to your flights, meetings, and other travel-related schedules in these apps, there’s no chance that these apps will not notify you of these events in real-time. Therefore, no more flight missing, cancellations, or humiliation in front of clients due to late arrival in the meetings.
5. The Apps Make Sure of Your Safety and Security
How’s that possible? An app, that ensures a real human’s safety? Confused, right? Applications for business traveling have certain features that allow you to enter various safety-related data such as emergency contact information, location tracking, etc. that can come into play when an SOS situation arises.
Also, these apps give travel advisory updates on issues by governments around the world so that you are wary of the situation that is going on in the region you are traveling.
6. It Allows Reimbursement of Expenses Too
This a surprising feature but travel apps do allow expense reimbursement. In fact, they simplify the entire reimbursement. As the submission of expense reports can be done with the help of mobile apps themselves and that too in the form of electronic form documents, i.e., PDFs, GIFs, etc., there is no need to carry paperwork and worry about submitting them in the office. This allows employees to enjoy more freedom while they are on a business trip anywhere in the world.
The Bottom Line
The way we organize things, reserve dates for important meetings, and approach corporate traveling schedules, all of it has been revolutionized by mobile apps. The credit goes to the way these apps operate. They simplify everything from flight booking and accommodation booking to even handling trip expenses.
Further, these apps have also become an integral part of all the tech out there that is coming in the travel industry. So, if we are talking about travel management software, it is one hundred percent sure that the platform itself will have a mobile app that will make it easy to access everything on the platform.
One such platform is ITILITE’s business travel management platform for entrepreneurs, employees, and business owners who are involved in business traveling most of their time. The platform has its own dedicated mobile app that offers travel scheduling, travel management, real-time tracking of the traveler, booking of flights, hotel bookings, best travel rewards programs, and the entire planning of business trips.