Establishing a corporate travel policy is an important part of leading your business to success when you have teams or employees who need to travel to get work accomplished or finish projects.
With that being said, some people ask themselves if there are ever occasions where creating a corporate travel policy is overkill, and where it might be better to run your business without one.
This is actually a really good and interesting question because it brings to light the topic of organizational bureaucracy and whether or not adding or removing layers of complexity makes any difference in how the business functions.
In other words, is it always true that creating more policies and regulations in the business increases efficiency?
Well, this is another good question. So in this blog post, you’re going to learn about the biggest pros and cons of corporate travel policies, which may help you to figure out if you should create one for your business or not.
Pro #1: It’ll Keep You More Organized
One of the biggest problems with business travel is that it can be really easy to mismanage funds, and basically leak resources while using credit cards to pay for travel expenses.
If there are no procedures, regulations, or rules at all regarding corporate spending, then guess what? Everything is going to be up to your team.
Nothing is going to get written off, and nobody is going to keep records for tax purposes.
Therefore, one of the biggest pros to creating a corporate travel policy is that it will help to organize these things so that they’ll be possible in the long term.
(Note: Need to create or update a corporate travel policy of your own? Hotel Engine has a great blog post about that.)
Pro #2: It’ll Save You Money
Let’s be honest.
When you give an employee a company credit card, they may or may not choose to use it responsibly.
They are probably not going to be as thrifty with it as they would be with their own money.
And in some instances, they may even use it to a lavish degree, thus costing the company more money than is required to perform the necessary functions of the job.
Hence, why creating some guidelines for corporate spending could be beneficial to the company’s bottom line.
Pro #3: It’ll Make Business Travel More Efficient
Traveling for business requires a lot of moving parts to work together correctly.
For example, someone needs to book flights, someone needs to book rental cars, someone will need to take care of lodging and accommodations, etc.
But whose job is this?
Which person is responsible for taking care of these details?
A good corporate travel policy streamlines all of this and basically makes it more efficient.
Con #1: It Takes Time And Energy To Put It Together
With everything we’ve talked about thus far, it might feel like there are really no downsides to creating a corporate travel policy.
Well, the truth of the matter is that there are many good reasons to create a travel policy.
And there aren’t that many reasons to avoid doing so.
With that being said, one of the possible cons of a travel policy is that it takes time and energy to put together.
In other words, for a very small business with a very closely knit team who knows exactly what their responsibilities are, taking the time to draft a whole corporate travel policy (and then trying to implement it, especially if it isn’t drafted in accordance with the accepted company practices) could just be an inconvenient and inefficient use of time and resources.
It’s possible that for some very small businesses, especially family-run businesses, such a travel policy just may not be necessary.
Con #2: It Takes Away Some Of The Flexibility
In some very rare cases, it may actually be beneficial for employees to not need the authorization to use company resources in creative ways.
For example, a really good salesperson might understand that putting a couple of games of golf on the company credit card in order to take a potential client golfing might look like a lavish expense on paper, but could very easily lead to a major sale down the road.
Giving a really good salesperson this kind of control over how they spend company funds could yield massive results in the long term, and could stifle creative potential in the short term.
Once again, it really all comes down to the situation and context.
Not every company situation is going to look like this. This is just a possibility to consider.
Conclusion
There you have it.
The biggest pros and cons of establishing a corporate travel policy.
Now, you probably have a much better idea of whether or not this kind of policy could make sense for your business.
All that’s left now is to make your decision and get to work.
James Martin is a passionate writer and the founder of OnTimeMagazines & EastLifePro. He loves to write principally about technology trends. He loves to share his opinion on what’s happening in tech around the world.
