Getting Open Bookers On Side
Inside every company you’ll always find the kind of people who are determined to ‘do things their way’. While such a headstrong attitude is often an attractive quality in a senior manager, getting them to follow a company travel policy can be a challenge — particularly when they’ve got their own preferred ways and means, and choose to open book their own travel. But there is a way to get them to see the light. It’s all about demonstrating value.
Few outside of the travel game will understand what open booking is. For many, booking company travel is a similar to arranging their personal travel; they simply peruse a few websites to find a good hotel, flight, and car rental service. On their return, they report the expenses and other data relating to their trip to their travel manager — the exact person they should have come to in the first place!
The upshot is that those making their own arrangements risk compromising their entire trip (especially if they opt for an unmanaged booking). They might find themselves displaced by an overbooked hotel, or stuck in a fleapit motel on the wrong side of town miles from where they need to be. They could miss out on cost savings if the deal they book drops in price. Worse still, they may not get a full expense reimbursement; if their trip breaches company policy.
Things can get messy when travelers use open booking. Letting an individual book a hotel, no matter how experienced in travel, may not do so to their company’s standards. That’s why they have a travel manager. It also gives the traveler an additional responsibility—they must keep track of their travel expenses and other records of their trip.
While busy travel managers do everything they can to get the best deals at the best prices — such as monitoring availability — in a company with multiple travel schedules, it becomes almost impossible to keep on top of every single development.
Arbitrip has the solution to help travel managers control these unmanaged bookings in a way that allows for efficient and customizable searches, and presents a smart intuitive insight tool that lets a travel manager to keep track of all of these bookings through reports.
While tech alone is no match for expertise, travelers looking for demonstrable results will see the benefits of using a tool like Arbitrip very quickly. They’ll realize that spending smarter and getting a great travel experience means trusting their travel manager to make the right decisions.
Ultimately, travelers need to appreciate that there are tangible benefits to working with their company’s travel manager; and that doing so isn’t just paying lip service to corporate bureaucracy — it’s an exercise in quality control, budget management, and logistics coordination.
