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One would assume that in the age of Zoom meetings and video calls on IM software, no one would ever have to travel for work.
After all, we have virtual tours and contactless transfers, and we’re actively trying to reduce CO2 emissions, so one might think that corporate travel is on the decline. Well, it turns out that those making this presumption couldn’t be more wrong. According to one statistic, an average business traveler takes 6.8 trips per year (with the number being even higher for millennials).
Corporate travel is an expanding industry, and airlines and rental services aren’t the only ones profiting from this. The same could be said for developers and designers of corporate travel platforms. Here’s what the development of one such platform would entail.
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People who travel a lot waste a lot of time on simple administrative tasks like booking, back-office tasks, and real-time inventory management. While essential to one’s ability to travel for work, they take disproportionately much time and effort. This is especially the case when one is supposed to handle them all while suffering from jetlag and in improvised office conditions.
Now, in order to make a good platform, you need to do two things. On sites like TravelPerk, you can see a list of some of the best travel agency software. Check what they do right and wrong. Second, try to figure out what the platform is supposed to do to begin with.
A corporate travel website needs to serve an important function. It needs to help you:
The success of your corporate travel platform will depend on its usability, and to do this, you need to focus on these several functions.
First of all, business bookings and rentals are a part of travel expenses, which means that you can’t just omit them or hope that the person going on business travel will save receipts. With a platform, these will be saved automatically and be available immediately.
A person who’s overseas on a business trip will usually have to check in back home. Well, the problem with this is that the difference in time zones may be so great that they’ll have to wait for the response for hours. With an IFTTT (if that, then that) protocol integration, all of this can be made automatic. This will make this representative more autonomous and more efficient in the eyes of your overseas partners.
Business expense and schedule analytics are essential for anyone who has a habit of traveling for work. This is why having all this data may make it easier for you to optimize your plans.
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In order to enhance the functionality of your platform, you need to understand who will be using it and for what purpose. Sure, different types of professionals will all travel for work and have the need for its various features. However, if you manage to single out an industry or a group, you have a shot at optimizing for a much better result.
Generally speaking, some people use these platforms more often. We’re talking about travel managers, corporate travel administrators, and finance teams. Each of these professionals is not just traveling themselves but supervising the travels of others.
Just keep one thing in mind. In an ideal world, everyone would do their job admirably, and there would be no need for anyone to ask for reports, watch out for idling at the office, or check if someone arrived at work late.
In reality, people slack, procrastinate, lack efficiency, and, on occasion, act too liberal with company resources. Sure, this is something you need to think about as early as recruitment but it’s not something that you can always predict. All of this can be avoided if their travels are monitored via these tools.
Even a business owner traveling for work will benefit from these platforms. Sure, they won’t have a tendency to damage their own company, but they might lack focus or fail to track everything that’s going on.
By focusing on just two things, transparency, and insight, your platform will already deliver what these professionals came there to seek.
One of the biggest problems with making a platform, let alone a travel platform, lies in the fact that you need to balance between privacy and necessary data for your functioning. On the one hand, you have all the financial information (booking and payments), your location, and even work data going through this platform.
Not to mention that your employees or users may travel to locations with different jurisdictions, which is also something you have to take into consideration. The permanent location of your users is also important. Depending on where they’re from, they might be subject to region-specific laws like CCPA or GDPR.
Remember that you don’t have to be from the EU in order to be under the GDPR. All it takes is for some of your users to be EU citizens, and the law automatically applies to your relationship and interaction. This is why a lot of platforms have trouble breaking into a foreign market, but for a corporate travel tool, there’s simply no way around it.
Still, not all laws are as well known as GDPR. What about DSA and DMA (Digital Service Act and Digital Markets Act), lesser-known laws regulating tech companies within the EU?
You can’t even begin to handle this issue without figuring out the difference between DSA and DMA. You also need to figure out how and where they apply them. For instance, what is the DSA meaning in your particular case?
At the same time, your users require a high level of customization, which would require you to have access to at least some information. At the same time, you want to minimize the amount of data you’re collecting, not just for the sake of compliance but also for reasons of security.
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When you think of travel, the primary device used in these scenarios is definitely mobile, so developing a mobile-responsive or even mobile-first site is a priority. Without this, you’re completely killing the very purpose of your site.
One of the biggest challenges when designing a site for mobile devices lies in the fact that we’re talking about so many different screen sizes. Therefore, you want to test it out on as many different devices as possible.
The site needs to be clickable and touch-friendly, which can be achieved through better layouts, cleaner interactive elements, and making navigation easy and intuitive.
One more thing you need to do is ensure that the platform can work with minimal resources. You never know when your corporate travelers will run out of Wi-Fi coverage, which means that they’ll have to rely on their mobile data. The last thing you want is for your resource-intensive app to drain its entire monthly package in a matter of minutes. So, keep it minimal.
This has one more perk, which is the fact that everything will load faster and be more responsive. In 2024, people expect websites to load just as fast on mobile as on desktop (with a minority expecting them to load even faster). By going minimalist, this is exactly what you’ll achieve.
A minimalist layout is also touch-friendly since it doesn’t have so many interactive elements crammed so tightly that you can’t avoid but touch them.
The main thing you must focus on is the fact that this is a product and, as such, it needs to have a specific value. You also need to be able to convey this value through your marketing. How much money will they save? How efficient will they be during their travels?
If you can’t find specific numbers on their performance improvement (the idea of being better at work-traveling is a bit silly, to begin with), try giving them concrete examples of what they’ll be able to do more easily. Name specific tasks (like expense tracking or booking) that they’ll be able to do much simpler than they did before. In fact, go as far as to describe the process and compare it to the old-school way of handling these things.
The most important thing, and the reason why we’re mentioning it here, is that you can’t let the marketing team think of the value proposition. This is the job of the development. You can’t trick people into using this platform – you have to actually offer them value, and this is something that needs to be integrated into the platform from the start.
So, make sure to get your marketing team and your development team (perhaps even the R&D department). This is the only way to figure out what’s appealing and what’s actually doable.
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In the end, in order to develop a perfect tool, you need to understand the target audience and how the tool is supposed to be used. Since it’s a site gathering sensitive data, you need to remain compliant with all the regulations and jurisdictions involved. Most importantly, you need a product that people will actually want to pay for. Your job is not done until you get all of this right.
By Srdjan Gombar
Veteran content writer, published author, and amateur boxer. Srdjan is a Bachelor of Arts in English Language & Literature and is passionate about technology, pop culture, and self-improvement. His free time he spends reading, watching movies, and playing Super Mario Bros. with his son.
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