Business Travel
Managing Traveller Safety in a Post-Coronavirus World
For organisations to remain strong when the coronavirus pandemic begins to ease, business travel must restart. How can they ensure that employees aren't travelling into infection hot spots?
Controlling Car Rental Spend With Car FOLIO
Many organisations have negotiated corporate rates with their preferred car rental providers. But with potentially many thousands of rentals each year, how can they verify that each traveller receives the appropriate rates? Chrome River is making it far easier to analyse the data with the launch of FOLIO for car rentals.
ERT - Ensuring Even Easier Expensing
At the heart of every expense management solution is the ability to quickly and accurately extract and make sense of the data on paper and electronic receipts. With the launch of Emburse Receipt Transcription for Chrome River, we're using innovations from across Emburse to get to the next level in intelligent expense management.
How to Manage the Ultimate Business Travel Policy
A unique travel management role just opened up in London: Director of Royal Travel, based in Buckingham Palace. How would you go about creating a travel program to cater to a group of very important people?
How to Avoid an ‘OK Boomer’ Reaction to Your Corporate Travel Policy
In the era of bleisure travel, ride-sharing and electric scooters, expense policies of old sound positively archaic. Any travel leader who expects their team to follow the policy down to the letter will likely be met with eye rolling and mutterings of “OK Boomer.” How can organisations keep their business travellers happy without killing the bottom line?
Does Your Organisation Have a Proactive Travel & Expense Process?
Do the travel processes and policies within your organisation help or hinder its core goals? Take our quiz to see how your organisation's travel culture could impact the bottom line.
Tackling the Challenge of German Per Diems
German per diems may not suddenly spring to mind as a critical business issue for global organisations. However, if you work in the world of corporate travel, expense or accounting, it can be a major source of angst. Thankfully, help is at hand.
Welcome to The River, Yatra Customers!
Chrome River is excited to announce a new relationship with Yatra, India's leading online business travel company. What does this mean for Chrome River, and Indian business travellers?
Banishing the Hotel Bill Nervous Breakdown
Tired of having to enter line after line of expense items for a simple overnight hotel stay? You're not alone... and you need not suffer any further, says Karen DeLucia.
Overcoming the Headache of Changing Global Expense Tax Regulations
There are countless nuances of international business regulations that organisations need to follow. In particular, how can companies ensure that they stay compliant with global statutory requirements for expense reimbursement?
Welcome to The River, SpotHero Customers!
Chrome River and SpotHero have teamed up offer an even easier way for business travellers to find, purchase, and expense parking spaces.
Keeping Your Team Happy (and Healthy) on the Road
For the team members that are at the core of driving revenue--sales reps, those managing suppliers, key partners, or account managers--frequent travel is imperative to their role and their company’s success. To keep these employees both happy and healthy, it’s critical that employers take steps to look after their team-members’ well-being while on the road. How can companies support this without breaking the bank?
Don’t Fox your Fleet: Why Expense Reimbursement for Trucking Companies Shouldn’t be Complex
One of the largest groups that travels on business is the trucking and transportation industry. With all of the stressors placed on long-haul drivers, what can fleet operators do to make the expense submission and reimbursement process as smooth as possible?
The Fourth Era of Expense Management: Spend Optimisation
We're seeing a paradigm shift in the world of expense management, from a focus on control and compliance to spend optimisation. CEO Alan Rich discusses where T&E spend analysis is heading.
How Analysing Your Holiday Customer Gift Spend Can Drive Next Year’s Revenues
Expenses such as holiday gifts for customers can help provide valuable data for measuring sales, but only if companies have the tools to analyse it. How can organisations make better use of this - and other sales team travel and expense data - to better plan for the future?
Business Travel in the iPhone Age: Lessons Learned and Future Strategies
It’s a little over 10 years since the iPhone was launched. Many things have changed in the business travel world since then, but few have had as much of an impact on travellers' productivity as the ubiquitous mobile phone.
Life After the Laptop Ban: Could you Survive a Business Trip with Just a Mobile Phone?
As a result of new U.S. and UK legislation, some business travellers may choose to leave their laptops at home. What would happen, though, if you also accidentally left your wallet at home? Could you survive life on the road paying for everything with a mobile phone?
Less Appy, More Happy: How the Mobile Web Can Lead to Easier Expense Management
Any expense management solution worth its salt these days will tout its mobile capabilities. Most of these solutions will highlight their iPhone or Android apps as a key selling point. However, for the both hard-pressed business traveller and the company for whom they work, apps aren’t always the best solution.
How Improving your Travel and Expense Policy Can Help Retain your Best Staff
Business travel is a topic that can engender huge differences in opinion among those whose jobs require them to spend time on the road. For some, it’s viewed as a perk, for others, a burden. Regardless of whether your employees love or loathe life on the road, it's essential to optimise the traveller experience.
Chrome River FOLIO: Taking the Headache Out of Hotel Folios
With countless different line items such as food, parking and high-speed internet, hotel folios can be a pain to enter into expense claims - especially when your expense management provider doesn't take info from a certain hotel chain. Chrome River FOLIO solves this challenge with a single click.
Alternative Facts and The Fallacy of Offline Expense Management
There has been a lot of discussion in the business software market about the benefits of browser-based, responsive web (RWD) apps versus native Android and iOS apps. Even though there is evidence showing that more and more organisations are moving toward RWD for mobile software deployment, the debate continues as to which is better, just like Mac vs. Windows, Peyton vs. Tom and Pepsi vs. Coke.
Productivity on the Road: How Your Expense Management System Can Contribute
Creating and submitting your expenses while on a business trip need not be a drain on productivity. What are the biggest challenges your users face with their expenses on the road, and how can these be resolved?
Bridging the Generation Gap: Catering to Millennials in Business Travel
In a previous post we spoke a little about the recent GBTA / American Express Business Traveller Sentiment Survey, and the impact of booking and expense policies on business travellers. This week, let’s look at how organisations can best bridge the generation gap when it comes to providing a better experience for their largest (and growing) audience - Millennials.
Why Sensible Travel Expense Policies are Critical for Business Traveller Happiness
The Global Business Travel Association recently announced the results of its Business Traveller Sentiment Index Global Report. The report assesses the overall happiness with several aspects of travellers’ overall experience, from making travel arrangements through to getting through airport security and taking various forms of ground and air transport.
Why Mobility is a Critical Consideration for Your Expense Management Strategy
Expense management is, by its very nature, one of the business apps with the greatest requirement for deep mobile functionality. Many software solutions are mainly used in-office, and can often get by with relatively limited mobile functionality for consuming data. However, expense management requires a significant amount of creating data while on the road – capturing receipts, creating reports and so on.
Perfecting the Packing: A Business Travel Suitcase
Packing a leisure suitcase is easy, or at least a lot easier than packing for a business trip. Not only do you have to carefully choose the right corporate, casual and in-between wear to take, but you have to do your best to ensure the clothes don’t arrive wrinkled, rumpled or otherwise appearing as if they were just fished out of a hamper. Four nifty strategies can help you master the art of business travel packing.
Chrome River and Sabre: Making Integrated Travel and Expense Even Smoother
As you may have noticed from today’s announcement made at the GBTA national conference, we are proud to become a Premier Provider of expense management for Sabre, one of the world’s biggest travel technology providers. This comes just a couple of weeks after we announced Sabre as the latest travel industry leader to adopt our expense management solution for its own 10,000 global employees.
Dress Code 101: Dressing Right on Your Business Trip
Just because business travel takes you out of your usual environment doesn’t mean you can ignore appropriate business attire. You still need to look crisp, clean and professional, which you can do with a careful selection of must-have items. Add a few casual options to the mix, and you’ll be ready for action in the boardroom or out on the town.
Chrome River and Traxo Means Even Easier Hotel Expenses
As you may have seen from today’s press release, we’ve just announced an exciting new relationship with Traxo for hotel receipt integration. This will give Chrome River EXPENSE users an even better (and easier) experience when preparing their expense claims, and we’re sure it will be very well received by anyone who’s ever had to manually import or allocate hotel receipt data into their expense claim.
Cost-effective Perks to Minimise (and Maximise!) Business Travellers’ Airport Time
We recently talked about how to keep your business travellers happy while maintaining cost control and avoiding expenses spiraling out of control. One of the biggest challenges many companies face is that those who travel the most are more likely to have specific preferences (hotel chains, airlines, etc.) that may not tally with your organisation’s negotiated rates. While this can lead to friction, there are several ways that can both make your road warriors happier and more productive, and also keep the CFO smiling.
Etiquette Tips for Your Business Trip
While leisure travel can be an ideal time to kick back and let down your guard, your guard had better not be going anywhere during a business trip. As a business traveller, you represent your company during every stage of the journey. Everything you say or do can impact your company’s reputation and your eventual success. You can ensure both the company reputation and your success remain strong by following a few straightforward business trip etiquette tips.
How to Plug Your Travel Policy into the Online World
While today’s travel managers may have the power to establish a list of preferred airlines and hotels to create the perfect travel policy, compliance may be less than perfect due to forces outside their control. Online and mobile platforms are consistently disrupting compliance efforts by allowing employees to book alternative accommodations outside the preferred partnerships with a swift click of a button.
Forget Airline Hassles: Corporate Jets Poised to Soar in Biz Travel Arena
Private jets are no longer just for the rich and famous; they are now set to take off in the corporate travel arena. Private jet companies are expanding their offerings to include a wider range of service, booking and corporate agreement options. BusinessTravelNews highlighted four U.S. booking engines, along with the progress they’re making in the way of business travel.
4 Ways to Escape Expense Report Purgatory
Whether you’ve just finished a week-long trip, or if you’ve been stashing receipts all month, doing your expenses can become one of those monotonous tasks that ranks even below timesheets at the bottom of the to-do list. This means that they get put off, and off, and off, until you reach a point where a) you’re broke and need them to be reimbursed so you can put food on the table, b) your wallet is bulging more than your financial controller’s eyes will once they see how much you’re claiming for the past few months, or c) both of the above.
Airfares Skyrocket for Multi-City Business Trips
One heck of a coincidence recently went down in the U.S. airline industry. Three of the largest airlines in the country have altered the way they price fares for multi-city trips, forcing multi-city travellers to shell out hundreds of dollars more if they continue to book multi-city flights.
China Flying High in Biz Travel Spending, Topping U.S.
China already beats out the United States on exports and automobile market size, and now the country has done the same when it comes to business travel spending. Chinese corporate travellers spent more than $291 billion in 2015, roughly $1 billion more than U.S. corporate travellers during that same period. The Global Business Travel Association reports the gap is predicted to widen even further in 2016.
And the Winner Is: 2016 Business Travel Award Highlights
Companies that are scoping out good hotels, great airlines or phenomenal in-flight entertainment options can turn to annual lists that rank the winners in a legion of different categories. One set of winners comes from the UK’s Buying Business Travel Awards, which acknowledge and celebrate the successes of the British travel industry’s outstanding performers over the past 12 months. The other set of winners comes from Entrepreneur magazine, which also serves up an annual listing of top-performing companies that meet or exceed business travellers’ needs.
Business Travel Packed with These Top Stressors
While more than one-third of corporate travellers typically feel positive about travelling for business, that doesn’t mean they all enjoy a stress-free experience. In fact, a massive 93 percent of business travellers heading to international destinations feel stressed-out at some point along their journey.
San Francisco Scores for Most Expensive US Business Travel Location (Again)
A daily allowance of £550 might take you far for a night out on your hometown, but it won’t go all that far at all on business trip in San Francisco. The City by the Bay ranks as the most expensive U.S. business travel location, again, with an average day’s expenditures totaled at £547.34.
Europe, Worldwide Travel Security Tips Update after Brussels Bombings
Travellers across the world are still feeling the after-effects of the Brussels bombings in the form of heightened security across the board. Many international airports, key transit systems and high-profile areas have beefed up their safety measures as a routine precaution, even without a specific threat of attack.
Chew on This: One Way to Get Biz Travellers to Eat at Preferred Restaurants
While travel managers can often negotiate preferred rates with hotels and even airlines, the same strategy typically doesn’t work with restaurants. Getting your business travellers to eat at preferred restaurants can be a major headache, as can tracking and managing dining expenses that come from a vast variety of different eateries.
Expense best practices to delight your employees AND your CFO
Anyone who has looked at some of the perks that companies offer will understand that any forward-thinking organisation places a premium on attracting and retaining the best talent. When you factor that it costs an average of 6-9 months’ salary to replace an employee, spending a little extra to keep your team happy is a sound investment. The hard cost of employee turnover is, of course, just one issue here. Companies’ ability to thrive is reliant upon attracting and retaining the best talent. Being unable to keep and hire staff can have a seriously detrimental impact on an organisation’s overall health.
Gaze Beyond the Star Ratings: What Hotel Ratings Aren’t Telling You
Many business travellers may choose their hotels based on one part expense policy compliance, one part colleague input, and one part online reviews. But if looking at online reviews means glancing at the overall numerical or star rating average for the hotel, they could be missing out on some key information that could make or break their stay.
Safety or Spying? Company Tracking OK with Biz Travellers
Would you feel safer or spied-upon if your boss tracked your mobile device with GPS while you were on a business trip? The answer largely depends upon where you may be heading, with 94 percent of travellers surveyed by Business Travel News saying they’d have no problems with tracking if they were heading into a high-risk area.
SOS! Did You Forget One of These Six Business Trip Survival Tips?
Some business travellers may be so used to hitting the road that they do so without even thinking. But that’s where you can get into trouble, perhaps forgetting one of the foremost business trip survival tips that can always make your trip go much more smoothly.
Surviving the Jet Lag Crash
Whether you call it by its scientific name of “flight dysrhythmia” or refer to it as plain ol’ jet lag, the condition can really wreak havoc on your next business trip. Try these tips to help your body adjust as quickly as possible.
Is the Zika Virus Taking a Bite Out of Business Travel?
Even though the mosquito-borne Zika virus has the world on high alert, global business travel appears to be buzzing along as usual. In fact, one Latin America-focused travel agency was quoted as not having seen any reduction in new bookings, nor cancellations of existing ones since the recent cases have been reported. Other industry insiders say corporate travel patterns are remaining consistent, although there has been in increase in the level of concern about the virus, particularly for businesswomen.
Safety Squashes Cost Control as Top Biz Travel Priority
Cost control has long been the top priority of companies that travel, but that was no longer the case in 2015. Results from Global Business Travel’s 2015 EVP Barometer found that safety and security have risen to the top of the list, followed by cost control and employee satisfaction. Other interesting tidbits from the annual report include a greater-than-anticipated travel spending increase in 2015 and compelling trends for 2016.
Get the Biggest Bang for Your Business Travel Buck
Business travel nets many companies nearly a 4-to-1 return on their investment, and you can do the same if you travel right. Traveling right means taking stock of a trip’s potential costs, potential income, and engaging in a few strategies that can help you make the most of your trip.
Business Mileage Reimbursement Lowered for 2016
Generous business mileage reimbursement rates are a thing of the past, thanks to the IRS revamping the rates for 2016. The new, lowered mileage reimbursement rate for a business vehicle is 54 cents per mile, down a full 3.5 cents from last year’s 57.5 cents per mile. The new rate took effect Jan. 1. Although the mileage reimbursement has decreased by 3.5 cents, the average price of a gallon of gas has fallen from $3.50 a gallon in August of 2014 to $1.77 in February of 2016. That’s over a 50% decrease in the price of gas so even at 54 cents per mile you’ll get a good bang for your buck (or half buck).
Not All companies are Uber-Excited About the Sharing Economy
Although business travellers are largely embracing service options available through the sharing economy, not all companies are equally as keen on the concept. In fact, a recent survey found a notable percentage of businesses outright prohibit the use of non-traditional lodging services, and car rentals still beat out ridesharing services when it comes to ground transportation options.
The Lowdown on Sky-High Wi-Fi
Wi-Fi has become such a necessity that 45 percent of business travellers who use it would actually be willing to go through the arduous security screening twice in exchange for a flight with a more reliable connection. Sixty-six percent of travellers were influenced by Wi-Fi options when choosing their flights, 22 percent have paid more for a flight just to get Wi-Fi, and 29 percent would give up their confirmed ticket for a standby on a flight with faster Wi-Fi.
Don’t Leave Home Without Your Smartphone – The Ugly Reality
Ever imagine what a business trip would be like without your smartphone? Most of us would shudder at the thought. Business traveller and VentureBeat columnist John Koetsier actually lived through the experience. And he promises it wasn’t a very enjoyable one. To put it as bluntly as he did, the words he used were: “It sucks.”
How Mobile Technology is Impacting Business Travel
Mobile technology already has such an impact on business travel that most travellers say Wi-Fi is the most precious piece of mobile tech that aids in productivity while travelling. In fact, a majority of corporate travellers from many countries say it’s absolutely vital during every business trip.
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Our choice of Chrome River EXPENSE was made in part due to the very user-friendly interface, easy configurability, and the clear commitment to impactful customer service – all aspects in which Chrome River was the clear winner. While Chrome River is not as large as some of the other vendors we considered, we found that to be a benefit and our due diligence showed that it could support us as well as any large players in the space, along with a personalized level of customer care.
We are excited to be able to enforce much more stringent compliance to our expense guidelines and significantly enhance our expense reporting and analytics. By automating these processes, we will be able to free up AP time formerly spent on manual administrative tasks, and enhance the role by being much more strategic.