Business travel is a top indirect spend area for many companies and could be challenging to manage efficiently without the right digital tools.
Today’s fragmented approach means adherence to travel policies is irregular, ‘on-trip’ spend like meals and taxis are rarely managed, and a reliance on manual expense claims burden travellers, finance teams and managers with administrative tasks.
A new era in business travel is emerging to support hybrid working, with companies focused on how travel can deliver maximum value in this new environment.
That’s why Amadeus commissioned experts from the Centre for Economic and Business Research (CEBR) to model the economic benefits should the industry apply the latest in end-to-end digital spend management technology.
Based on research with corporate travel and finance teams from large companies in the US, UK, France and Germany, CEBR’s work highlights the economic opportunities of digitally transforming travel and expense.
End-to-end digital spend management completely reinvents how companies pay, account for and manage travel.
Rather than travellers paying and reclaiming, instead the traveller is provided with a virtual card containing a pre-agreed budget for the trip.
The virtual card is stored on the traveller’s smartphone so they can easily pay with the company’s money while traveling.
The historic expense and reclaim process, which relies on travellers paying with their own money, enhances scope for fraud, error and out of policy travel spend.
By replacing employee payment methods with a virtual card for a pre-agreed budget, CEBR found that end-to-end digital spend management could save corporations $31 billion in annual direct travel spend.
Rudy Daniello, executive vice president, Amadeus Cytric Solutions, commented: This study makes a strong economic case for an end-to-end approach to spend management digitalisation.
Massive digital transformation is coming at exactly the right moment to answer the need for more efficient and intelligent business travel that companies can better justify, measure and control.
