Today's business travel agencies are essential partners in helping you organize your business travel and improve your overall logistics. In this dynamic era of the travel industry, these agencies offer much more than just booking flights and hotels at the best price. They integrate innovative technological solutions and offer personalized services.
For your business trips in France, Europe and all over the world, these business travel experts let you concentrate on the essentials, while benefiting from smooth, efficient management of your business travel!
What is a business travel agency?
A business travel agency provides travel services to companies and professionals. Its mission is to create customized itineraries that meet the company's travel needs, and to organize business trips. The business travel agency obtains advantageous rates for flights and hotels, and also provides assistance in managing travel expenses. All companies, whatever their shape, size or needs, can benefit from these services.
What services does a business travel agency offer?
The services offered by a business travel agency can include air, rail and hotel reservations, car rental and other services related to business travel. These agencies are often equipped with modern booking tools and technologies to efficiently manage travel itineraries, expense policies and other logistical aspects of business travel.
Why should a company use a business travel agency?
There are many advantages to using a corporate travel agency. Here's the full list.
Save money with negotiated offers
Business travel agencies negotiate prices with partners, enabling you as a company to benefit from the best rates for your business trips. As a result, you save a lot of money on your travel expenses.
Indeed, if you book your air tickets and hotels directly through different providers, the rates will be higher than through a corporate travel agency. What's more, if you book through a corporate travel agency, you may benefit from room or flight upgrades and many other VIP services, which are certainly not at the same price when you book directly yourself.
Efficient management of business travel expenses
Corporate travel agencies make it easy to centralize travel bookings. This means that all reservations, whether for flights, hotels or car rentals, can be managed from a single booking platform. This gives you an overview and makes it easier to manage expenses. Business travel agencies also simplify the expense management process. In fact, travel-related expense information is usually integrated into the company's expense management platform.
Compliance with travel policies
Corporate travel agencies can integrate corporate travel policies into their system. This ensures that bookings comply with corporate guidelines on costs and preferences. Employees are thus guided in their choices, contributing to better control of expenses.
Customized advice and itineraries
Using a corporate travel agency for your business will ensure you get the best advice for your travel needs. For example, corporate travel agents know exactly which hotels to recommend and which to avoid.
Over the years, our agents have acquired a certain expertise that enables them to identify your needs and plan a trip that perfectly matches your project, while respecting your budget.
Our travel agents will create a personalized itinerary for you, taking care of all the administrative and technical details. They'll provide you with the documents you need for your business trips, including visas for international travel. If you need to organize a complex trip with connecting flights, for example, a travel agency has the expertise to simplify the task.
Save time and energy
As a company, you can quickly become overwhelmed by the task of organizing all your business travel. You've already got a lot of projects to manage, and simply delegating the search for itineraries, flights, hotel rooms and car rentals is a considerable time and energy saver.
If you decide to entrust the organization of your business trip to a specialized agency, then you and your employees will be able to reinvest the time saved in other activities. This is especially true if your company travels on a regular basis. Entrusting the organization and management of business travel to an agency not only optimizes your company's financial resources, it also enhances its human capital!
Personalized assistance for business travelers
Through its travel services, a specialized agency can offer business travelers H24 assistance and support throughout the duration of their trip. This applies in particular to requests for changes, exchanges and cancellations of airline tickets for your employees' trips. If you have the slightest question or encounter a difficulty, a travel agency is on hand to resolve the situation as quickly as possible.
Using a business travel agency: any drawbacks?
As with anything, there are also a few disadvantages to using a business travel agency. However, the disadvantages pale in comparison with the list of advantages it offers.
Although business travel agencies offer simplified management of business trips, negotiated rates and 24/7 assistance, it's worth noting that they charge additional service fees, including administration fees.
In addition, itinerary customization can be limited compared to a stand-alone approach. Nevertheless, these disadvantages are often outweighed by the time saved, compliance with company policies, savings achieved through negotiated travel offers at the best price, and peace of mind linked to dedicated assistance in the event of unforeseen circumstances.
How to choose a business travel agency?
Before you start looking for a business travel agency, it's essential to be clear about your company's needs, and your employees' expectations and habits. To do this, you can ask yourself the following questions.
What is your business travel budget?
How often would you like to organize business trips?
What destinations do you have in mind?
What type of accommodation do you prefer?
What type of transport do you plan to use?
Once you've identified your needs, it's time to start looking for the best business travel agency for you! First of all, we advise you to opt for a travel agency with a good reputation in the field. To be sure, check online reviews, ask for references and find out about the agency's length of experience and know-how.
Be sure to ask about the travel agency's ancillary services. It must be able to understand your needs and expectations, advise you and take care of your employees' travel from A to Z.
A modern travel agency should have advanced technologies to facilitate booking, itinerary management, expense tracking and so on. So check whether the agency uses efficient booking platforms.
Choose a business travel agency with quality customer service. Travel agents need to be available whenever you need them, and responsive to unforeseen situations.
Find out carefully about the options available to you for reporting a problem, as well as the agency's ability to resolve it quickly, remotely and safely. For example, a delay on the part of the traveler, or a delay on the part of an airline or rail company, can jeopardize your travel plans.
A reliable business travel agency will be able to cope with the unexpected and find you a last-minute hotel, a replacement plane, etc. We therefore advise you to turn to a flexible agency with whom you can change tickets right up to the last minute. We therefore advise you to turn to a flexible agency with whom you can modify your tickets right up to the last minute.
If you want to opt for an environmentally-friendly trip, make sure the agency can offer you low-carbon footprint travel.
As you can imagine, organizing a business trip requires a high level of commitment, technical expertise and professionalism. Today, most agencies have mastered both offline and online tools.
Some are available both physically and online, which is a real advantage: you can visit your nearest branch and talk face-to-face with a travel agent, but you can also stay in touch and manage the progress of your business travel program from a website/and or mobile app.
The corporate travel policy (PVE), essential for your business trips
When it comes to business travel, you'll need to draw up a corporate travel policy (PVE) specific to your company. This involves establishing a set of rules to govern employees' business travel, setting a precise framework that defines the budget, expenses, means of transport and accommodation, as well as ensuring the comfort and safety of your company's business travellers.
For example, this policy must specify :
expenses identified as business travel expenses;
the terms and conditions for reimbursing advanced expenses;
specific guidelines on the choice of airlines, hotels, modes of transport, etc. Some employers may encourage the use of public transportation or environmentally-friendly options;
maximum duration of business trips ;
guidelines on reimbursable meals, expense limits and any meals included on business trips.
However, if you don't know how to go about it, or if you're short of time, a business travel agency can also take charge of implementing your corporate travel policy.
So, if you don't have the necessary resources in-house, using a business travel agency represents an excellent opportunity to explore new growth prospects for your company!
