INSIGHT
5 business travel reports to review ahead of 2025
A new year is always an opportunity to reflect and think ahead when it comes to your travel program strategy.
To do that effectively, you need reliable data that is not just easy to access, but will tell you the real story. A business travel reporting tool and multiple dashboards that allow you to analyze and predict. Supported by the brains of your team and travel management company (TMC) Account Manager to decipher what it means, and to determine your next steps.
These are some of the key business travel reports you can explore as you start to think about your 2025 strategy.
1. Budget, spend & savings
A no-brainer! Wherever you are in your company’s financial year, it’s always a good idea to take stock of where your business travel budget lies, and what could be optimised for the months ahead. If you’ve made any changes, you can monitor if behavior has shifted. Or by keeping track of expenses, you may spot an anomaly that could save money in the next quarter.
How your Account Manager can help: Discuss anomalies or challenges with them to identify ways to move forward; they have the expertise and support network to tackle these differently.
What FCM Platform shows: Interactive dashboards allow you generate a custom business travel report on whatever you need, and view travel spending by type, supplier, dates and more. It also works like a search engine. Ask Platform’s reporting suite any question and the data will appear below e.g. what is my hotel spend difference year-on-year?
2. Compliance
When your or your finance teams are sifting through the business travel data, you’ll want to check business trip compliance amongst your employees. You can really only do this with corporate travel reporting and data that spans not just your TMC partner/s, but across all expenses.
How your Account Manager can help: Possibly one more for a data analyst or a consultancy, but it’s a big number crunch to obtain and assess your true total business travel expenses.
What FCM Platform shows: By capturing third-party expense data from expense management tools like Concur Expense or simply emails, you can see what was booked with FCM, vs what was expensed out-of-channel.
3. Future predictions
As much as you want to look back, it’s more important to look ahead in your business travel reporting. What changes would you like to see in 2025, what are some of those small niggling tasks or challenges that you’d really like to tackle? Your travel data is the starting point to getting those projects off the ground.
How your Account Manager can help: Plan out your priorities for the year, or perhaps for the next six months if that’s too daunting! Learn how technology or services in your current TMC stack can support your moves, cost savings strategy, and future business trips.
What FCM Platform shows: Simulate business travel policy adjustments yourself and easily explore the ‘what ifs’. FCM Platform will show you the impact of that policy change, for example how much your spend could increase or decrease.
4. Environmental, social, and governance (ESG)
From sustainable travel to inclusion, travel managers are considering people and planet in different ways. Your reporting suite can give you insights into your environmental impact, carbon emissions and traveling population so you can make informed decisions that reflect the true picture.
How your Account Manager can help: If you haven’t already, share your company’s ESG targets with your Account Manager. With this information at hand, they can better understand how to support your overarching goals and the full business travel experience.
What FCM Platform shows: travelers can choose a U or X pronoun in the FCM Platform. These travelers may need additional support depending where they are traveling to. For sustainability, visual displays depict what your carbon footprint is across various travel categories and serve up sustainable content to travelers.
5. Wellbeing
Duty of care has stepped up to be more than safety; it’s the overall wellbeing of your travelers too. Reviewing data such as trip frequency, time of flights, and accommodation types will help you identify where your employees could be burning out or aren’t fully ‘on-point’ for these important trips.
How your Account Manager can help: With the data to hand, your Account Manager can offer advice on how to tweak your travel policy or highlight some preferred suppliers that could help reduce stress and boost wellbeing.
What FCM Platform shows: View reports such as red-eye flights, weekday vs weekend bookings, and how many flights were taken outside of business hours.
Supercharge your 2025 strategy
Build a powerful travel program for 2025 and beyond with on-point reporting. Minimized leakage. Maximum control.
With FCM, your data & analytics is easy-to-access in the FCM Platform, supported by expert insights delivered by your Account Manager. Plus, if you need that additional deep dive into your business travel reporting, you can lean on the gurus at FCM Consulting.
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