More often than not, business travelers book their own trips, whether that is directly with the airline or through a discounted consumer booking site. When changes or cancellations to a reservation occur, companies do not have access to their employees’ travel data, trip costs, fees and any unused tickets. If an employee isn’t effectively tracking their banked tickets, or decides to leave the company with unused ticket credits attached to their name, it creates a financial/reporting nightmare to reconcile.
Business travel plans fall through; meetings change, priorities re-adjust, and even staff changes can lead to tickets going unused. Throughout 2020 and 2021, the pandemic has created many trials for corporate travel to take place. Because of this, businesses are losing more money to unused airline tickets than they realize. Travel managers also have to step in to attempt to redistribute unused tickets or report balances to the finance team.
To avoid the above scenarios, here are the best practices for business travel savings on unused airline tickets.
Work with a Travel Management Company (TMC) like that has software for tracking and reapplication of unused tickets. Business travelers often find it difficult to keep track of unused travel funds, and travel managers are failing to report any outstanding credits. By working with a TMC, your business can relieve itself of the extra work it takes to track ticket refunds and vouchers.
Ensure the tracking software fully automates the conversation for unused tickets for online and offline reservations. For example, ITS (TripAudit), automatically applies unused tickets toward the purchase of news tickets for both online and offline reservations. Travelers do not have to remember to search and apply for unused tickets because the work is done for them behind the scenes. Specific parameters are worked out with each client to adhere to accounting and project code needs.
Confirm all unused tickets and re-used tickets are fully captured and reported on for full visibility of spend and savings. All unused, re-used, and refunded segments should be reflected on a monthly management report to show savings for those tickets that have been re-used and remaining funds available for unused, pending tickets.
How can ITS help manage your company’s unused airline tickets? ITS airline ticket management can save companies up to 22% through auto-capture lost tickets, auto-void unused tickets, auto-save unused tickets and auto-apply saved tickets. With ITS product features, companies receive email ticket expiration reminders, recycle unused tickets automatically through TripAudit, search no-shows in real-time, monitor banked tickets to reissue, identify name change opportunities and prevent personal travel fraud. ITS is more than prepared to handle all scenarios with unused airline tickets and make sure the process runs as smooth as possible for your company.
