Your key to an well-planned business trip

A successful business trip starts with a detailed travel itinerary. Through it, you’ll clearly outline your trip and its goals.

What’s a business travel itinerary? What should it contain? When should you get it ready, and how? Read on for our tips on how to create a watertight business travel itinerary.

Let’s start with the basics: what’s a business trip?

A business trip occurs when an employee or a manager takes a trip outside of their usual place of work for corporate purposes. This could be attending a client meeting, a seminar, a conference, or participating in a business fair.

The term business trip is particularly used when the work-related trip is more than 24 hours long. Such a trip can also be referred to as corporate travel.

Companies in the know often put together roadmaps. A roadmap is a great planning tool as it spells out the action plan (that is, all the key steps and tasks to be completed) to achieve a goal.

When used to plan a business trip, a business travel itinerary is the trip’s roadmap of sorts in that it’s a great planning tool. It’s the roadmap you prepare ahead of the trip and distribute to the employees going on the trip.

As its name implies, the business travel itinerary includes a detailed itinerary and provides employees with an overview of the different steps in the trip.

While having one is optional to go on a business trip, a business travel itinerary is a useful document to have with you.

When it comes to business travel, the keywords are organization and planning ahead.

Going hand in hand with that is, of course, the business travel itinerary. But since you put it together once all the trip details have been arranged, down to the reservations, let’s first discuss the steps to take before.

Before planning anything, the first thing to do is be clear about the business trip’s goals.

• What is the purpose of the trip?
• What objectives does the company wish to achieve?

It’s also good to ask yourself if the trip is necessary and consider its cost-benefit ratio. For example, a business trip incurs many costs for the company (transportation, accommodation, and so on).

Once you’ve asked yourself these questions, it’s time to start outlining the actual trip:

• Where will the business trip take place? What is the planned itinerary?
• What are the trip’s main moments? Who are the key people to meet?
• Who’s taking part in this trip?

All these elements must be very clear: they’ll help you put together your business travel itinerary.

Once you have the destination and itinerary in mind, it’s time to plan travel expenses and put together a budget for any potential expense reports.

There are several areas to budget, such as transportation and accommodation costs or fees to attend a seminar or a conference.

Ideally, you want to book transportation (plane or train tickets, for instance) and hotel rooms ahead of time to grab the best deals and optimize your budget.

The company is responsible for paying any expense incurred during the trip. 

• Either the employees on the trip pay for their expenses directly. To get reimbursed, they must file an expense report, including all supporting documents (such as receipts).
• Or, employees have company cards and can use them to pay for their trip expenses.

Did you know that Qonto offers both physical and virtual payment cards that are fully customizable? That way, your teams no longer need to pay upfront for expenses and file expense reports. This also lets you stay in control and follow their trip expenses in real-time, should you wish to. And, if your employees travel by car, you can also provide them with business fuel cards to use at gas stations.

Before you leave, another element to check is whether you and your employees are covered by the company’s insurance policy during the trip, especially if this trip is going to be abroad.

Now that everything is booked and the trip is looming closer, you have one last key thing to do: create your business travel itinerary.

This travel itinerary can resemble anything you want, as it’s not a mandatory document. It doesn’t need to contain any compulsory mentions or such and such.

However, to make it a valuable document to have on hand, here’s what we recommend your itinerary includes:

• contact information (name, first name, address) of all the employees going on the trip;
• objective and goals of the trip;
• date and time of departure;
• length of the stay (including the total estimated duration);
• means of transport that will be used;
• lodging address;
• contact information of the people you’ll be meeting;
• addresses and exact location of the meetings and rendezvous scheduled,
• agendas for the different meetings;
• and more broadly, the schedule for the trip.

Your itinerary can also be in the form of a table if you find that clearer.

A business travel itinerary has many advantages for the company and its employees.

Business trips can be stressful times, with lots to think of. Where do I need to go? Who am I supposed to meet? Why am I meeting them? What time’s my meeting? How long am I going to be gone?

By providing your employees with a detailed business travel itinerary, you’re giving them all the information they need to feel reassured and organized during the trip. They can also save time thanks to that detailed document.

Unsure when the meeting’s taking place? A glance at their itinerary will tell them all they need to know.

Through a business travel itinerary, the company also has a clearer understanding of the business trip’s objectives. This makes it easier, post-trip, to assess whether the trip’s goals were met.