Top 5 B2B travel solutions for your company

Just as consumers have go-to websites to book their personal travel, businesses need platforms to book and manage the travel needs of their workforce. 

There’s a lot to manage. Business travel is an octopus touching any number of roles and functions—encompassing everything from booking, expense reporting, and manager approvals on the employee side to cost control, risk management, and technology considerations on the business side. The best corporate travel software delivers on both ends, driving a pleasant and predictable employee travel experience while enabling travel managers and other stakeholders—HR, accounting, and finance among them—to run policy-compliant travel programs that keep a lid on costs.

Choosing the right B2B travel system is key to setting up your corporate travel program for success. In this article, we’ll aim to help you land on the right tool for your business’s needs—and reap the benefits of a modern corporate travel booking software.

What are B2B travel solutions?

B2B travel solutions help companies manage the travel needs of their workforce with software and services. These platforms are designed with corporate travel needs in mind, and some are geared toward certain aspects of corporate travel, such as expense management or booking.

Many travel solutions are designed to automate what might otherwise be time-consuming tasks, such as booking flights, hotels, or rental cars that meet the guidelines of your corporate travel policy, filing and approving detailed expense reports, or analyzing outlays on business travel at scale.

For our purposes, we’ll focus on two categories of B2B travel solutions: travel and expense management solutions, and booking and reservation solutions.

Travel and expense management solutions

Travel and expense management solutions are designed to help employees, managers, and central travel teams (like travel managers) track and manage the expenses associated with travel. That can include receipt capture, expense reports and tracking, managerial approval, compliance checks, and more.

Some travel and expense platforms have neat solutions built in to speed up expense reporting, like auto-filling expense reports based on AI scans of receipts. They may offer real-time spend controls that flag when an employee is spending too much, or when an expense may be non-compliant. Some platforms integrate with accounting and payroll platforms to pipe right into the corporate financial network.

Booking and reservation solutions

Booking and reservation solutions facilitate the booking process for business travel—flights, hotel rooms, rental cars, and similar reservations that can be time-consuming, costly, and disorderly if not standardized across your workforce. 

These can take the form of software or service providers—or a mix of both. Software is often a reservation platform accessible to employees for booking, or to a team of centralized travel managers who book on behalf of employees. Service providers may be third-party travel agents who do the booking for you. Some firms might purchase a booking platform in addition to travel services with agents who can be on call for emergencies, or to help out during other travel snafus like cancellations related to weather. 

Top 5 B2B travel solutions for your company

Searching for a B2B travel solution can be overwhelming—there are a lot of options on the market, and they’re not all built the same. Here’s a roundup of six to help you land on the right platform for your business.

1. Travelperk

Travelperk is a travel management platform designed to help businesses book and manage corporate travel. It has a booking system that allows employees to book flights, trains, cars, and hotels directly inside the platform using Travelperk’s own inventory. Businesses save money thanks to Travelperk’s access to negotiated rates, and admins can easily set travel policies that govern what employees can book.

Key features:

• Set travel and expense policies directly in the platform
• Expense approvals and spend dashboards for admins
• Savings on bookings thanks to negotiated rates
• Easy cancellation (recoup 80%)
• 24/7 travel support
• Green-booking options that help employees find sustainable travel options

Key benefit: Ease of booking inside the platform, and access to 25,000 negotiated rates in 150 countries.

2. SAP Concur

Founded in 1993, SAP Concur is one of the more-established B2B travel platforms available. It offers travel and expense management capabilities designed to help streamline booking and expensing, while offering real-time insights into spend along with compliance tools to manage the wider travel program. You can buy capabilities a la carte; offerings are broken out into Expense, Travel, and Invoice.

Key features:

• Expense offers automations to speed up reviews and processing, including auto capture on receipts and dashboards to analyze spend at scale
• Travel is a booking platform that empowers employees to do their own booking within the parameters of your travel policies.
• Invoice is an accounts payable platform that streamlines expense approval with an eye on compliance and cost controls

Key benefit: Proven travel software popular among large enterprises. 

3. FCM Travel

FCM Travel’s booking platform takes a tailored approach to customers’ needs, tailoring the booking platform to the rules and policies of individual corporate travel programs. FCM offers in-person support (“travel experts”) if employees need additional support. The software comes with reporting to manage costs, and dashboards that help you track travelers to be able to offer support in the event of an emergency. 

Key features:

• VIP travel feature that includes added support for executives
• Risk management dashboards to make informed travel decisions with regard to employee safety
• 24/7 support in 95 countries 

Key benefit: Executive travelers can get added support, and risk management is simplified with dedicated features designed to help travel managers keep employees safe when they hit the road.

4. Egencia by American Express Global Business Travel

Amex’s Global Business Travel (GBT) provides access to corporate travel services ranging from all-in-one booking and management software to consulting services that help you get your corporate travel program off the ground. One of their offerings, Egencia, is a travel management platform powering business travel end-to-end with booking and other capabilities. A premium GBT Select offering is available for those with bespoke requirements.

Key features:

• APIs can feed travel and expense data into other platforms in your tech stack (such as for user management, expenses, and reporting)
• A mobile app where travelers can book, store receipts, and track expenses 
• Sustainability features that allow bookers to sort travel options by carbon emissions, for example
• An optional Advantage program that includes services for visa processing, flight insurance, and risk management 

Key benefit:  A “Savings Finder” that monitors rates on hotel and airfare bookings, and rebooks automatically if rates go down.

5. Navan

Navan offers online booking plus travel management features like spend management, reporting, and sustainability. A Pro offering pairs the booking and expense platform with travel agents. Employees can use the Navan platform to book their personal travel, too, and apply awards accrued from business trips to personal getaways.

Key features:

• Rewards for business travel that can be applied to personal travel
• Travel spend dashboards for real-time reporting and analysis
• Event-planning features to help organizers plan team meetups and other corporate events

Key benefit: User-friendly booking software that allows employees to book both personal and professional travel. Rewards for travel booked on the platform—which encourages compliance with your travel policy—can be redeemed without blackout dates, and at no cost to you (Navan fully funds rewards up to maximum value of $100 per booking).

Key features of B2B travel solutions

The market for B2B travel solutions is saturated with options, and many may appear similar on the surface. How do you differentiate between all that’s out there? Here’s a look at six crucial features HR managers and business owners should look for in a solution, and why.

Global inventory

Inventory, in travel speak, refers to the range of potential bookings available from a travel provider. That means both the types of travel you can book–from flights to hotels to rental cars, and even trains–and the options available within each category, including destinations, carriers, flight times, and so on. 

More inventory means more choice when it comes to booking, which could offer employees more control over how and when they get from point A to point B. Greater inventory also means employees are more likely to book on-platform versus an unapproved website, for instance, which can improve compliance. 

Safety and risk management features

Businesses are required by law to look after their employees when they travel for work (this is known as the “duty of care”). That means staying on top of who is traveling where, and the potential risks that await them. If there are risks, you’ll need to weigh those against the potential upside to the business and whether the risks apply to the traveler in question, among other factors. 

Even if destinations are perfectly safe to travel to, things happen. People become sick, weather grounds planes, employees get robbed. With that in mind, look for B2B travel solutions that can help you prepare for these eventualities, whether by making resources available to employees in one centralized location, or by offering a dedicated support line staffed by qualified travel agents who can help out in a pinch.

Compliance features

Creating your corporate travel policy is one thing; enforcing it is another. Some B2B travel solutions can help you achieve a higher rate of compliance by allowing you to build your policies directly into the platform to govern the options available to employees when they book. 

Look for a platform that allows you to set budgetary parameters, including rules for certain categories of travel and classes of booking, as well as “special” rules, like those for teams that may need to spend more on last-minute travel to service urgent client needs, for instance.

Regardless, some travel will inevitably be non-compliant. The best platforms flag non-compliance so you can address it with enforcement, or tweak your policy according to the real-world travel needs of your workforce.

Real-time travel expense tracking

Tracking and managing travel expenses is often a primary motivator for implementing B2B travel solutions. Make sure the platform you’re considering offers real-time insights into spend, so that you can check in on travel outlays at any moment. The best platforms allow you to drill down according to different categories of travel and types of travelers (at the team level, for instance).  

Deep customization according to business needs

Every business has unique needs when it comes to business travel, so look for a platform that will accommodate yours. Often that means the ability to set up custom parameters according to your travel policy, but it also applies to the process of booking, payment, approvals, and expense tracking. How customizable are the approval workflows, for example?

Some companies have strict sustainability policies, or different travel policies for different business activities. Some treat executive travel differently. Make sure the platform you choose can be configured to meet these and other requirements.

Easy integration with other systems

Tech stacks today are overflowing with tools that need to be able to integrate with one another for data to flow seamlessly between them. Make sure the system you choose integrates with existing tools that fulfill functions your travel solution doesn’t—namely those related to IT, user management, security, accounting, payroll, and expense management.

Benefits of using B2B travel solutions

There are a range of benefits associated with B2B travel solutions, many of which involve streamlining what would otherwise be disparate methods of booking, tracking, and managing the program. Here are five benefits worth considering as you assess your needs and what’s available in the market: 

A better booking and travel experience for employees

B2B travel solutions can radically improve the employee booking experience, if only by offering a clear and repeatable way to go about arranging business trips. 

Travel solutions are often implemented in concert with a broader corporate travel program that aims to provide employees with clear guidelines and policies governing travel for booking, expenses, and reimbursement. Travel solutions are the tech that powers it all and activates the policy among your workforce, while giving you the tools to manage travel spend and assess it against your goals for the program. 

End-to-end improvements in efficiency

B2B travel solutions are designed to automate and streamline what might otherwise be time-consuming tasks at all stages of the employee booking journey. That saves employees precious time and frees them up to focus on the jobs they were hired for. Travel solutions save travel managers and executive stakeholders time and headaches, too, by streamlining key aspects of compliance and risk management, for instance. 

Enhanced reporting and analytics on travel spend

B2B travel solutions empower corporate leaders to extract efficiencies from travel programs by making it easy to analyze spend and other key performance indicators (KPIs). They can help financial managers:

• Predict future travel demand based on historical data
• Analyze spend to see where costs are concentrated—whether they are tied to certain roles or departments, methods of travel, or routes, for instance
• Identify patterns in travel behavior that could inform the next iteration of your corporate travel program
• Generate insights for monthly, quarterly, or annual reports

Customized support for employees

B2B travel solutions can offer employees a pathway to help when they need it, whether it’s during the booking process, while they’re filing expense reports, or on the road .

Policy compliance according to company guidelines

Travel solutions can be implemented with your company’s corporate travel program in mind, and they can even automate some aspects of compliance—flagging, for example, if spend is crossing a certain threshold. Some come with built-in risk management tools that provide risk assessments for travel destinations to keep your travelers safe.

Automate expense management with Rippling

Rippling is an expense-management platform that allows you to automate expenses with complete control thanks to expense reporting with real-time policy checks, seamless approvals, and direct accounting integration. 

Why Rippling is the best option for travel expense management

Rippling consolidates all of your company’s finances—from payroll and benefits to corporate cards and expense management–giving you an up-to-date view of cash flow across your company and offering unprecedented control over spending patterns.  

While most expense management solutions only allow for basic employee-manager approval chains, with Rippling expense management’s advanced policy engine, you can set hyper-custom policies based on the vendor, dollar amount, and expense category, helping you block out-of-policy expenses with ease. You can also tee up automated workflows that help you control spend, like triggering an alert when a department’s expenses sharply increase. 

 Other reasons why Rippling stands out for travel expense management:

• Automated approvals to drive efficiency: Automatically route expenses and bills to the right approver every time.
• Built-in checks to boost compliance: Rippling can enforce travel-expense policies and flag out-of-policy spending with hyper-custom policies, like by vendor or value, for further review. 
• AI to eliminate admin: Close the books faster with AI-powered transaction categorization, and integration with your accounting systems.
• Real-time insights to track travel spend: Get real-time visibility into travel and expense data so you can track spend against targets. You can also build role-based dashboards so users can monitor what’s relevant to them. One for the controller, one for team leads, another for the CFO, etc. 
• A user-friendly interface for easy adoption: Rippling has a user-friendly interface that makes it easy for employees and managers to submit, approve, and track expenses without much training. Employees can also submit expenses from an easy-to-use mobile app.

FAQ

If you’re just diving into the travel management software procurement process, you may also be wondering:

How do B2B travel solutions differ from consumer travel solutions?

B2B travel companies differ from consumer travel solutions in that they are tailored to the needs of businesses and business travelers. They’re built to accommodate corporate travel programs that have specific processes and controls in place around booking, spend, reimbursement, compliance, and administration.

Can B2B travel solutions integrate with other business systems?

Most B2B travel solutions integrate with other business systems using APIs or custom integrations, though many aim to centralize as many travel-related processes into one platform as possible. Common integrations include those for user management, IT/security, accounting/payroll, HR, and expense management.

How can B2B travel solutions help with policy compliance?

B2B travel management can help with policy compliance by centralizing various aspects of your corporate travel program into one tool. Booking platforms can be configured to allow only reservations that are compliant with your corporate travel policy. Further, some travel expense tools can flag vendors or claims that may be noncompliant and require a closer look.

Disclaimer: Rippling and its affiliates do not provide tax, accounting, or legal advice. This material has been prepared for informational purposes only, and is not intended to provide or be relied on for tax, accounting, or legal advice. You should consult your own tax, accounting, and legal advisors before engaging in any related activities or transactions.