Why use a travel management company when traveling for business?

About to board a plane like this in search of business contacts abroad? Have you considered employing the services of a travel management company?

As a rapidly growing startup, your new angle of how to do things in your niche is beginning to get traction, capturing the attention of venture capitalists far and wide. At this stage in your business, the time has come to get out from behind your laptop and begin to rack up some frequent flier miles in search of that sweet funding juice.

However, beyond using travel aggregator websites to book plane tickets for holidays in the past, travel planning is something that nobody in your business has never done before. Before the bootstrapping spirit awakens and compels you to attempt to coordinate this tricky task yourself though, we want you to consider a co-operative travel management arrangement with a professional services company.

This will allow you to focus on what you do best, whether it is sales, marketing, or negotiating a killer financing deal with an angel investor.

Still not convinced? Here are a few reasons why contracting out planning to a travel management company can improve the performance of your business.

#1: They are more experienced at the ins and outs of business travel

As alluded to in the introduction, if you’re like most people, the extent of your travel planning experience might involve a few nights spent booking a holiday flight to the Caribbean on Expedia. When it comes to your business, there are extra considerations that allow a travel management company, who have managed all aspects of travel (flight/hotel/rental car) for numerous clients for many years, to save your company tons of time and money. This alone makes outsourcing these tasks to an outside firm well worth the money you’ll spend.

#2: They know the most efficient means of getting you there

After you have been hammering away at a problem for hours on end, you suddenly remember that you have to book a flight to meet that new hotshot tech millionaire throwing money at any new firm that sounds remotely decent. You sort by cost (of course, you stingy bootstrapper you) and hit submit. The next week, you realize as you check in online that your flight leaves at seven in the morning, connects through 4 different airports, and arrives about 12 hours after the direct or one connection flight would have pulled up to your destination airport.

Oops.

A travel management company would have made the more time efficient booking, counseling you on the merits on spending a couple extra hundred dollars to arrive fresh as a daisy at your destination.

#3: When they take the planning wheel, your team can focus on productions

When you throw yourself into your business, you barely have time to eat or sleep, so when accelerating business forces another hat onto your head by taking on the role of travel planner, the quality of your work and your personal life suffers as a result.

A sign of a maturing businessperson is when they recognize that they can’t do it all by themselves, so when you make the decision of offloading something like travel management to a highly qualified professional services company, you free yourself to do the things that truly matter, both in your startup and in your life.