Employees these days travel to various destinations for business purposes. Most of them experience stress during business trips. Likewise, many employees do not engage in business travel confidently due to safety concerns.

While making business travel arrangements, employees safeguard their personal wellness by booking the right hotels. They opt for hotels that keep them comfortable, stress-free, and safe by providing the required facilities and amenities.

Also, each employee spends a significant part of the business travel budget on hotels, usually known as corporate hotel rates.. Hence, no organization can control the average cost of business trips without focusing on reducing corporate hotel spending.

Your organization can control overall business travel costs by tracking corporate hotel spending consistently. The tracking will help you understand business travelers’ preferences. And the tracking the hotel spends will help you identify areas to reduce business travel costs.

There are a number of reasons why your company must make corporate hotel spend tracking an ongoing process. Let us see some of the benefits your organization can leverage by tracking the money employees spend on accommodations at the time of business travel booking.

9 Benefits Your Organization Can Leverage by Tracking Corporate Hotel Spend

Ensure Travel Policy Compliance

You can help employees book the right hotel by setting clear business travel and expense policies. But, you can control costs only when employees do not violate these rules while making business travel arrangements. It becomes easier for you to evaluate policy compliance and detect policy violations when you track various travel expenses including hotel spend regularly.

Negotiate for Better Rates

Ongoing hotel spend tracking makes it easier for you to understand the travel choices and preferences of employees. You can analyze the data to identify the hotels and hotel chains your employees choose at the time of business travel booking.

The understanding will help you control costs by negotiating with suppliers for corporate hotel rates. Your corporate travel manager or corporate travel consultant can leverage real-time data while negotiating with existing and new suppliers.

Meet Duty-of-Care Obligations

While making a business travel budget, you have to keep work travelers safe and comfortable by investing in the duty of care resources. It becomes easier for your organization to meet the duty of care obligations when employees book hotels that keep them safe and relaxed during the business trip.

When you track corporate hotel spend, you can check if your employees are booking hotels that make guests feel safe and protected. You can meet the duty of care obligations by recommending employees book safer hotels.

Prevent Travel Expense Fraud

Often travel expense fraud executed by employees escalates business travel costs. Employees often commit travel expense fraud by submitting inaccurate expense claims, inflating expense amounts, or producing false receipts.

Your team can track and prevent expense fraud committed by employees by tracking and reviewing the travel expenses incurred by employees regularly. Hence, your organization can prevent revenue leaks by tracking corporate hotel spending effectively.

Speed up Travel Expense Reimbursements

Many employees experience stress after business trips when there is a delay in travel expense reimbursements. Corporate hotel spend tracking helps you check if the travel expenses incurred by employees are being reimbursed quickly and timely.

Also, you can speed up travel expense reimbursements by fixing the issues delaying the crucial process. Hence, you can make business travel less stressful for employees by making corporate hotel spend tracking an ongoing process.

Optimize Budgeting and Forecasting

Often small businesses and startups find it challenging to maintain a positive cash flow position due to forecasting business travel costs inaccurately. You can make business travel budgets and forecast business travel costs accurately by tracking the money spent by employees on one of the expensive business travel products.

While making budgets, you can forecast business travel costs based on corporate hotel spending in the past. Also, you can share the information with employees to make it easier for them to make trip-specific business travel budgets.

Claim Tax Deductions

Keeping expense reports, invoices, and receipts organized is an essential prerequisite for effective corporate hotel cost tracking. You can keep various documents organized and accessible in digital format.

But your finance or accounting team has to put in extra time and effort to keep these documents handy before the tax season. You can make it easier for them to claim tax deductions by providing detailed information about the travel expenses incurred by employees along with the relevant documentation.

Get Data-Driven Insights

You can track corporate hotel spending effectively only by accumulating and unifying employees’ travel expense data. You can analyze the unified travel expense data regularly using data analytics solutions. The data analytics solution will help you make informed decisions based on real-time data.

At the same time, you can leverage data-driven insights to accomplish a multiple goals such as improving business travel experience and safety, finding opportunities to control business travel spending, and negotiating with suppliers for lower hotel rates.

Make Business Travel Sustainable

While increasing business travel spending, your organization contributes towards carbon dioxide emissions. You can no longer impress customers, investors, and other stakeholders without making business travel sustainable.

Your organizational policies should improve sustainability by encouraging and recommending employees to book eco-hotels or green hotels within corporate hotel rates. But you can check if employees are making sustainable travel choices only by tracking the hotels they opt for while business travel bookings.

Conclusion

Your organization can enhance employees’ business travel experiences and control business travel costs simultaneously by tracking corporate hotel spending. You can track corporate hotel spending accurately, regularly by and automatically implementing the right travel management software.

The software will facilitate the real-time tracking of business travel expenses related to hotels by providing an intuitive dashboard. You can analyze corporate hotel spending or corporate hotel rates using various metrics by generating custom reports based on real-time travel expense data of employees.

At the same time, the software will use data analytics to help you identify patterns and trends in corporate hotel booking by analyzing employees’ travel expense data. That is why; you can leverage the benefits of tracking corporate hotel spending by automating the business travel management process.