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FairFly: FairFly is an excellent resource for corporate travel management automation (if we do say ourselves), especially if the majority of your business travel involves air travel. While FairFly is known for its features for finding and managing business flights, it is also expanding into offering hotel solutions as well. This makes the solution more versatile, as you can use some of its features even if your employees are driving.
FairFly’s most popular feature is the ability to reshop flights (and hotels) after booking them. This lets you plan ahead but helps ensure you get the lowest price, thanks to the use of flight price tracking. This ability to check prices also allows FairFly to deliver price assurance for TMCs. There are also solutions for unused tickets and to provide travel insights that can further help you optimize your costs.
Gatekeeper: Gatekeeper manages relationships with your external supplies, your company, and your employees. This has in-house applications for collaboration, but the vendor portal can also be useful for business travel. After all, you likely have a set group of vendors that employees work with while traveling, from food to rental cars to hotels.
The vendor portal on Gatekeeper lets vendors set up profiles and input the required data. This reduces the time and effort you put in. This system aims to let you digitize and automate processes, saving time to spend on more important tasks.
Planergy: Planergy is a platform to help you manage your expenditures, with the focus on purchase orders. While this has plenty of applications outside of business travel, it can also work for this situation. One example is the ability to create budgets as well as spending limits for departments. You could use that when booking flights and accommodations for travel. Or, use this feature to prevent overspending by corporate travels on things such as meals. The main benefit for corporate travel is the ability to prevent unapproved purchases and to look for savings opportunities. But your business may also use this tool to reduce errors and manage purchase orders for other departments that don’t travel.
Spendesk: This is one of the travel tools that works for more than just travel, as it also works for any type of spending in your company. From the perspective of corporate travel, Spendesk essentially lets you track all of your spendings in a single space and do so by users.
That ability to track spending by user is particularly helpful, as it accounts for situations when travel is booked with a corporate account, but employees spend their own money on food or other travel-related expenses and need to be reimbursed. Spendesk can connect these to the same user. It also lets employees automatically create expense reports to streamline the reimbursement process.
Spendee: Spendee lets you easily track the expenditures related to business travel, including what employees spend on food and other items while traveling. It tracks spending in real-time and makes it possible to attach receipts. The only caveat is that this is a free app designed for personal use, not business use. That being said, you can recommend it to traveling employees to help with reimbursement and expenditures.
The Takeaway
Using corporate travel management automation tools will let you reduce work for your travel procurement team and save money in the process. Products like FairFly are particularly useful, as they let you cement your corporate travel plans in place while still taking advantage of future price reductions.