At this point in your rapidly expanding business, you have been traveling more extensively to court clients further afield, to seek out vendors/factory owners in faraway lands that can greatly reduce your costs, and to seek additional financing from venture capitalists that are just dripping with the money that you need to supercharge your growth.

One headache you haven’t anticipated though is the surprising complexities behind business travel. Much to your surprise, there are many more processes involved than simply booking a plane ticket on an online booking engine, printing off a boarding pass and then just hitting the road.

There are forms to fill out, tax considerations to consider, and risks to weigh. To take these issues off your plate, you have been assessing the viability of starting a professional relationship with a co-operative business travel management company. These firms offer many benefits to business firms experiencing problems with regards to travel planning; in the lines to follow, we will discuss the core ones that will transform and streamline how the travel part of your business infrastructure works.

Let’s dive right in…

1) They take all the paperwork surrounding international travel off your hands

Certain aspects of travel, like applying for passports and foreign visas, are enough of an annoyance to deal with when you do these things for yourself. When you have to do it for multiple people, and file additional paperwork with regards to business visas, it gets to be an intractable mess.

A corporate travel planner is dialed in with regards to all the varying requirements that different nations require for entry, and has a team of assistants behind them ready to handle paperwork for multiple people within your organization, freeing you and your employees to focus on making you money, rather than wasting time on bureaucratic red tape.

2) They track all the costs of travel, so you can take steps towards greater efficiency

While you attempt to get and keep all the receipts from your travel for the tax benefits they confer to your business, there is so much more that you can do with the data that you collect every time you hand over your gold card on the road. By tracking expense in different categories, a corporate travel planner can find new and innovative ways to save you money when you travel, freeing up precious capital that other departments within your company desperately need.

3) Added security & peace of mind from having experienced travel professionals working for you

In the post 9/11 era, security considerations inevitably must be addressed by any corporation seeking to avoid lawsuits from any incidents that could have been avoided. A corporate travel planner that is on top of their game thinks about these risks constantly, tracking security concerns around the world every day, and advising against travel to certain regions, and applying necessary precautions for travel to other regions that are generally safe, but carry specific hazards that need to be heeded (e.g. travel to regions where kidnappings of business people is an occasional occurrence).

By dispensing destination specific advice, and taking out the appropriate insurance, you can rest easy that you and your employees are protected against any potential dangers that lurk in certain foreign countries.