Corporate Travel - Who will be driving?

Business Insight
15/12/2016

Who in your company oversees your company travel arrangements?

Is this yet another thing that gets dumped on someone’s already busy desk, or worse, a sort of ad-hoc arrangement, with someone fitting in a dash to the airport between calls, or collecting someone on the way in to work?

Company travel arrangements are often fluid and difficult to predict, meetings overrun, and connections can get missed or cancelled, resulting in disruption, and vary between the need to transport a single individual, a small team of specialists to a site or much larger numbers, perhaps to a conference, or an overseas trip.

There are times when a visiting client, a company bigwig or other VIP needs meeting from the airport but do you have a suitable vehicle in the fleet, is it in tip top condition and will it represent your company or branch in the way you would wish? Then who is to drive, is there someone suitable available, or do you send a taxi firm?

How much better it would be for a professional uniformed chauffeur to collect your client or group of VIPs from the airport? Yet very few businesses would entertain the cost of keeping chauffeurs, limousines or coaches on their books for such occasional use, which is where the services of a specialist chauffeur drive company used to managing airport transfers and regular luxury transport for business clients come in.

Chauffeur driven car hire services are convenient, discreet and reliable – perfect for high profile clients or business executives. Many senior managers or company directors find it convenient to be driven between appointments in comfort, giving them the opportunity to review their paperwork, and seeing the journey as almost an extension of their office, or allowing them quite simply to relax between appointments , arriving on time and unflustered by the exigencies of driving through traffic.

Chauffeur driven transport allows your key personnel to concentrate on the task in hand, and is much safer, no risk of being distracted while driving, by perhaps attempting to carry on a telephone conversation or thinking about the upcoming meeting rather than concentrating on the road. There are cost efficiencies too for your key personnel in being transported door to door to multiple appointments arriving fresh, relaxed and prepared each time.

The benefits of chauffeur drive don’t just pertain to limousines and executive saloons, chauffeur driven luxury coaches are also available in a range of sizes, depending on your requirements, ideal transport for the company do, or meeting a team from the airport or transporting them between sites.

There are a number of companies offering chauffeur drive and coach hire, under regular contracts or one off trips, providing modern, top of the range vehicles with professional experienced drivers, and create a first rate impression on visiting clients. Although a luxury option, when compared to the initial outlay of purchasing the vehicle, maintaining it and staffing it, the figures stack up very favourably.

If however you need a broader range of services such as train, hotel or flight bookings you may find it more convenient to enlist the services of a corporate travel company who will deal with everything for you. Commonly used by large corporates to minimise and control spend on business travel, SMEs (small to medium enterprises) are now looking seriously at outsourcing their travel management to business travel agents.

After all, who in your company has time to look up connecting flights, get the best deal on train or coach travel and accommodation, and would not be better employed on their core tasks? Business travel agents provide a flexible solution and a release from the frustrations arising from the often almost hopeless task of trying to get timetables and business appointments to dovetail. In almost every case this amounts to a huge amount of wasted time in a busy working day.

Corporate travel companies are often able to negotiate better deals too due to the volume of bookings they make. In addition, the extra business travel information and additional services provided by business travel companies can make it even more cost effective to use an out sourced service.

From Airline tickets (scheduled, consolidated, internet, private jet hire),world-wide hotel reservations, rail tickets (UK Domestic, European, Eurostar), meetings and conference arrangements, passport and visa procurement, to car rental / chauffeur drives, they usually provide a 24 hour service including VIP meet and assist, and concierge services.

Whatever your corporate travel requirements there are many companies ready and willing to help and advise. When choosing, check if they hold membership of any of the recognised travel associations, whether they number companies in your sector amongst their existing clients, what qualifications they hold, what their insurance covers and look at their customer reviews.