Blog post

Top reasons to have an agency manage your business travel

 

Do you really need a company to manage your corporate travel? The Air New Zealand and Jetstar websites allow you to book flights, you can book rental cars direct, and there are booking engines for accommodation. That is true, you can manage all of that yourself, however, it is the understanding of what you’re missing out on and what happens when things don’t go to plan that sell the true value of a having your business travel managed by specialists.

Whether you spend $20,000 per year on travel, or $2 million – the following are all key reasons to demonstrate the importance of having an agency manage your business travel.

 

Show me the savings

It’s what everyone is looking for right? Cost savings you get will come down to a number of things. With air travel for instance, if you have a certain volume of spend, we can negotiate your own individual airline agreements to give you some really strong savings. Or even when booking airfares – we see all airlines, all airfares, so you know that we’ll be giving you the total picture of all available fares.

Airfares aside there are other savings to be had through the buying power of a business travel agency. Orbit transact over $400m per year in travel which means a lot of bargaining power with accommodation providers, airlines, rental companies etc. – with savings, rates, and added benefits that we then pass onto you. Many of our clients wouldn’t be able to access this level of rates and benefits on their own.

The often forgotten saving, but a very important one, is staff time. Whether that is staff making bookings, managing expenses and invoices, or dealing with issues when they go wrong – that has a huge cost. How much time do your staff spend managing travel needs?

 

Duty of care - managing risks and disruptions

Whether you like it or not, there are incidents and disruptions happening everyday – situations that impact on your travel plans around both NZ and the world. What do you do to minimise travel disruptions when they happen? The role of a business travel agency is to have their finger on the pulse of all these things – to limit the impact on you, your business, and your staff.

Knowing that disruptions happen all hours of the day, afterhours support is crucial. How are you currently supported afterhours? Having a 24/7 personalised Kiwi afterhours service is a unique point of difference Orbit are proud of offering our clients.

Our duty of care is to support your duty of care. When you add the fact that the government’s Health and Safety at Work Act (2015) includes a duty of care component, it shows how important this is for businesses.

 

Accessing tools and technology

Whether it is accessing a travel app, detailed reporting, a booking tool or unique products - technology and innovation should be a central part of how your business travel is managed. Orbit’s business model is built around continual improvements to our tools and products customised to our clients and their needs. In the pipeline right now, we have 5 new or enhanced tools planned for release between the next 2-12 months.

Investment into our reporting tool and booking tool are two key areas of the Orbit business that we know add significant value for clients – value in terms of both cost and time savings.

 

Invoicing and expense solutions

We know it doesn’t sound exciting, but we also know how much of a benefit invoicing and expense solutions are. How much time do people in your business spend managing invoices, expenses and receipts each month? Even if you have a solid process for it, it still costs your business time. Any serious corporate travel specialists should have proven expense management systems – the devil in the detail however is how much of a competitive advantage those tools will give you. Something we are extremely proud of is our consolidated invoice solution – the one, easy to understand invoice includes flights, rentals, taxis, accommodation, chargeback costs – it’s all there. We first released it almost 20 years ago, and today it is still recognised as an industry leader.

 

​The support and advice you need

If you manage your business travel yourself, the chances are you’ll get by - but what happens when you want to make more savings? You want a better understanding on how to be smarter with making bookings? Travel plans are disrupted? Or you have issues with a supplier that need to be managed? Our relationship with clients is that of a business partnership – cheesy as it may sound, we are here to help and to make your job easier.

We have over 1,000 business clients around NZ and each of them has an Orbit point of contact, and has a team available for their domestic, trans-Tasman, or international travel. We also have a dedicated product team so if you need to look into new suppliers (or have issues with existing ones) – we have the relationships to deal with this on your behalf. This gives our clients peace of mind that they will always have the experienced support they need from across the business.

And one of the best things about our support and advice is that there will be changes, improvements, and insights that we have from across the business with our others clients that we can take on-board and apply for your business.

So whether you are influenced by cost savings, disruptions and duty of care, technology and tools, or ways that we can make things easier for you, the overarching benefit is that a business travel agency will have their finger on the pulse of all your needs – flights, accommodation, taxis, rentals, expenses, reporting, partnerships, expense management – you name it.

Providing a corporate travel service isn’t about saying we will deliver you the cheapest, bargain basement prices you’ll find, but it is about demonstrating that we have everything covered for you so that you can spend more time doing your job.

 

How certain are you that you are getting the best value from your business travel?