Enforcing Managed Travel Rules
To find out more about business travel policies, the NBTA, along with Egencia (Expedia's business travel arm), commissioned a study performed by TRW Travel & Expense Management. The online survey was distributed in April 2010 to more than 2,000 organizations in the U.S. and Canada, ranging from companies spending less than $1 million per year on travel to those spending more than $50 million per year or more.
The study found that while instituting travel policies is the most effective way to contain travel costs, there was a divide on how businesses enforced these policies. The divide is between whether these policies should be considered mandates or guidelines. According to the survey, 62 percent of respondents said that travel policy represents "guidelines that employees should observe but that allows for exceptions." Meanwhile, 35 percent said that their policy states "rules that employees are required to follow as a condition of employment." This is often referred to as a "mandate."
"In the real world, a mandated program would be best so that everybody is on the same page and everyone follows the same guidelines and the requirements are all the same," Maguire says. "In reality, while mandates are still probably the best, very often policies tend to have flexibility. For example, upper management in many cases won't be required to follow the same rules as the rest of the work force."
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