What is travel management in a small business?
Travel management is the organised process of using rules to keep track of and plan all the details of work trips. The practice makes booking travel, keeping track of costs, and getting reimbursed easier and more consistent.
Travel management includes making rules about trips and costs, overseeing suppliers, and accepting reimbursements for travel. Booking travel and planning for business travellers are standard parts of this job.
Monitoring and reporting of travel and travel-related prices and expenses is also part of travel management. Businesses can learn more about how their workers travel, make decisions about changes or improvements that save money, and help employees with a sound travel management system.
A traveller’s boss is usually in charge of keeping an eye on their trips and the costs that come with them. However, management should be based on rules that say what types of airfare are allowed, how much hotels cost, how to book, and how to handle changing travel needs.
Keeping track of the costs of running a small business can be hard. However, making a policy for business travel could help companies avoid problems and give clear information about how much it costs to be on the road.
What should you look for when selecting small business travel management software?
A 2025 GBTA survey found that filling out a single expense report takes your workers 20 minutes and costs $58 to process. That is not counting the time it takes them to gather and organise their receipts before they start. That is why most businesses need a better way to handle travel for work.0
When picking a business trip management tool, there are a few essential things to remember. In your assessment, you should think about these five things:
1. An easy-to-use design
The next travel management tool you buy should have an easy-to-use interface that lets employees and managers find, book, and make itineraries and keep track of travel costs. As mentioned above, bad UX is one of the most significant problems when using a travel option. A platform that is easy to use means that users do not need to go through a lot of training. Also, making the program easy to use is essential for getting people to use it, and it stops leakage when employees book outside the platform.
2. The ability to integrate
Does the trip management platform work with the systems you already have in place? For example, does it work with spend management software, HR platforms, accounting systems, or even your company card program? Broad integrations ensure that your new systems can work with your existing ones. They will also help you automate tasks and make things run smoothly. Integrated cards keep track of all of your trip costs in one place.
3. Customisation and following the rules
You will need a tool that ensures travellers follow your company’s travel policy before booking a flight or charging for travel. To ensure you follow your company’s rules, look for a tool that lets you change the booking choices, the approval process, and the spending limits. Adding limits on cabin class and lead times for booking are two examples.
4. The report and the analysis
How can you tell if your trip program is giving you the best return on investment? Powerful reporting tools are necessary to understand travel costs, find ways to save money, and make choices based on data. A leading system will provide real-time expense tracking and detailed analytics on spending patterns, policy compliance, and supplier performance.
5. Support around the world and the duty of care
If your business requires employees to travel internationally, ensure your system covers flights, accommodations, land transportation, and duty of care to keep employees safe. Also, think about how good the customer service is.
These things will help you choose a business travel management tool that fits your company’s needs and makes your travel program run more smoothly.
How do you choose the eight best travel management software for small businesses?
A quick search for “travel management providers” will bring up many results, so we will list the pros and cons of the eight best ones. With business travel costs projected to reach over $1.48 trillion, companies of all sizes need good travel management. Business travel, like conferences and talks with clients, is essential for building relationships, closing deals, and boosting growth. More than 75% of people who answered a 2025 Brex survey about business travel said they had increased the money they spent on travel in the last year.
1. Brex’s
You can keep track of all your spending in one place with Brex’s flexible spending limits. As transactions happen, the AI-powered platform learns from them and improves at finding out-of-policy costs and possible scams. Brex’s global coverage and support for multiple currencies and languages make it easy to handle travel across borders. This makes it an excellent choice for companies that do business internationally or want to grow internationally.
Important parts:
- A lot of travel options and instant web booking
- Complete management of trips and expenses
- Keeping track of and organising expenses in real time
- automated processes for receiving and approving
- Adding support for well-known accounting tools
- Credit cards, both digital and real
- Wide range of perks, including cash back
- Five-star mobile app and easy-to-use design
- Help for multiple currencies
- Payments for local and global
- The duty of care part
2. TravelBank
TravelBank is a platform for modern businesses to handle travel expenses and business cards. It is excellent for tech-savvy companies and their workers because it is easy to use, offers reimbursements, and focuses on mobile devices first.
Important parts:
- Combined booking of trips and management of expenses
- Real-time enforcement of policies and automatic approval processes
- AI-powered scanning of receipts and cost classification
- Built-in awards system to encourage people to save money
3. TravelPerk
A tool for managing business travel called TravelPerk makes it easier for companies to go on trips. TravelPerk stands out because it focuses on making travelers happy. It has a lot of travel choices and advanced reporting tools.
Important parts:
- A large selection of travel choices, including some that are affordable
- Gives an 80% refund for any reason when you quit.
- Program to reduce carbon emissions for eco-friendly travel plans
- More in-depth data and reports to help you save money
4. Navan
As of 2016, Navan was known as TripActions. It is a well-known tool for managing travel, corporate cards, and expenses. It uses AI and machine learning to make planning more personal and simplify processing expenses. Navan wants to help businesses of all sizes, but its features and support may work best for big companies with over 1,000 workers.
Important parts:
- Personalised search results and suggestions driven by AI
- Real-time reporting of expenses with automatic sorting
- Access to negotiated deals and a global flight inventory
- Complete control over policies and review processes
5. The Routespring
Routespring is an AI-powered platform that makes booking work trips and keeping track of expenses easier. It has all the usual travel control tools, plus features like dynamic policy enforcement and predictive analytics. Routespring wants all its stakeholders, such as employees, managers, contract workers, interview candidates, customers, and other guests, to have a smooth and quick experience.
Important parts:
- Booking suggestions made by AI based on what travellers want and what the company’s rules are
- Enforcement of policies that change based on real-time market factors
- Integrated expense management with automated receipt capture and categorisation
- An analytics platform to help you save money and learn more about travel
6. Itilite Small Business Travel Management Software
Itilite is an AI-powered business travel management platform that aims to streamline corporate travel processes while reducing costs. It stands out for its incentive-based approach, encouraging employees to make cost-effective travel choices. Itilite’s platform combines booking, expense management, and analytics in a straightforward interface, catering to businesses of various sizes.
Important parts:
- An incentive engine that rewards employees for cost-effective travel
- AI-driven personalised travel recommendations
- Automated policy compliance with real-time enforcement
- Analytics dashboards for spend optimisation and travel insights
7. AmTrav
AmTrav is a single platform for booking, managing, and reporting on business travel that aims to put travellers first. It stands out for its blend of innovative technology and human support, catering to businesses of all sizes and focusing on midmarket companies.
Important parts:
- All-in-one platform for flights, hotels, cars, and rail bookings
- 24/7 proactive travel support from US-based travel advisors
- Customizable policy engine with real-time enforcement
- Comprehensive reporting and analytics dashboard
8. TravelPlus
TravelPlus touts itself as a travel management platform that works for everyone. It combines advanced technology with personalised service, offering an end-to-end platform for booking, managing, and analysing business travel. TravelPlus focuses on delivering a quality travel experience while providing ways for travel managers to control costs and ensure compliance.
Important parts:
- AI-powered booking engine with personalised recommendations
- Dynamic policy enforcement with real-time approval workflows
- Integrated expense management with automated receipt capture
- Comprehensive analytics dashboard for spend optimisation
- Some users report occasional delays in customer support response times
Travel management for small businesses: a comprehensive guide
Even for small businesses, travel is necessary. Meeting a lead in person can be the last thing that makes them decide to become clients. So, here are some tips to help your small business trip plan work well and without stress.
Larger companies usually have a set budget for business travel. This lets them confidently book several trips each month and gives them extra freedom on the trips themselves. Also, they are much more likely to have already a plan for how to move.
Smaller businesses that want to start business travel may have to start from scratch with this travel policy, spending, and other rules. It might seem too much to handle, so talking with leads over video call instead of in person might seem more appealing and easier.
This guide will tell small businesses what they need to think about and set up before they start sending workers on business trips.
How do you manage business travel in a small business?
Small businesses spend more on travel than big ones as a share of their total costs. You must set priorities, goals, and procedures to make your work travel cost-effective.
The most important things for small businesses to do:
- Consolidation means doing as much as possible in one round trip and not doing the same work twice.
- Compliance: Make sure your employees know why they have to follow your spending rules and follow them.
- Giving your employees the freedom to plan their trips in a way that works for them and lets them quickly respond to situations where they need to travel
- Accountability and transparency mean keeping an eye on why your employees are travelling, how much they are spending, and what their goals are.
A sound travel system makes work trips well-planned, cost-effective, and valuable. Also, safe travels!
Setting up a travel policy Management for a small business
If you want to keep your work travel capacity, you need a clear travel policy.
The first attention should be on organisations. The rules for travel must be:
- Simple and easy to understand
- Well, I told everyone who might be sent on work trips
- Held together in one place so that everyone can easily get to it
- Simple to work with, and workers only need to take a few steps to plan their travel.
Along with the travel strategy, business travellers’ essential documents and information must be well-organised. Make sure that all of the traveller’s information is in one place. That way, it will be as quick and easy as possible for them to book a flight, a rental car, or a hotel.
They should also know how to ask permission to go on these trips. Employees should be aware of and pushed to follow the rules through a messaging app like Slack, an email, an online form, or something else.
In case something bad happens during or after the trip, there should also be clear rules about what to do, such as
- Flights missed
- There is no room in the hotel
- Client or lead cancelling the meeting close to the trip; lost papers and expense claims that are not filled out;
Extreme conditions that require an immediate return
Our piece on why and how to write an expense policy for a small business goes into more detail.
Having to follow the rules
It is time to focus on ensuring people follow your travel strategy if it meets the above four standards.
Having everyone in your company follow these rules will make business travel run more smoothly and make your workers happier and more productive.
That being said, there must be room for change, making this a balancing act. You should know when to take the rules literally and when to use them as guides. For freedom to be possible, travellers and managers must be able to talk to each other freely.
Travel Management: How to Report and Measure the Effects of Small Business
Good expense tracking makes it easier to travel for work in the future. Travellers for business must know how to keep track of their costs, and the process should be quick and straightforward. To do this, the best advice is to use a platform for booking travel or software to keep track of money and costs.
Finally, it is too important not to talk about the trip’s non-monetary parts. There should be a way for the traveller to give feedback on how the trip went after it is over, like a short evaluation. Take a look at these questions:
- Did you ever run out of money on the trip?
- Did you finish everything on time?
- Were the steps easy to follow?
- Was the contact before the trip enough?
- Did you feel like HQ was there for you on the trip?
Make this survey easy to find and quick to fill; if they can do it while waiting for their trip, that is even better.
How do small businesses plan trips?
Businesses of all sizes can book and manage business travel in several ways. Both of them have good and bad points. These are your choices:
- Business travel companies
- Travel websites for consumers
- Free travel tools for business people
Check out our post for the best free tools for small businesses to book travel. There will also be some tips on how to save money.
Business travel companies
Corporate travel companies can help small teams in essential ways. They are helpful for businesses that do not have a travel manager on staff or who have an office manager whose main job is to handle travel. These groups can be beneficial to intermediaries. They can help you get better deals from the companies you need, like hotels, flights, car rental companies, and more.
A lot of the time, travel companies know about hidden discounts that are not posted online for everyone to see. But these firms are also businesses, and they want to make money. This can mean that your company ends up paying more.
Websites for consumers
On consumer websites, people can type in where they want to travel, when they want to travel, how much they want to spend, and so on. The sites then display a page of choices from many airlines. Kayak, Booking, and Skyscanner are all well-known examples of this. Small companies can also use them, but most people use them for personal trips.
The pros are having a lot of choices and being able to find cheaper solutions. For businesses that choose an open booking strategy for business travel, this is a simple choice that makes it easier for workers to plan their trips. Lastly, your staff probably already knows how to use these websites for booking trips, so there is no learning curve.
You are also letting your workers decide how much money to spend, which makes following the rules even more critical.
Small businesses can use free tools to make bookings
Online booking tools are much better for business trips than holidays, and are the best way for business trips. Most of the time, they combine the best parts of consumer websites that are easy to use with the help and knowledge of business travel companies.
Businesses can monitor and control their travelling workers through these sites without paying a lot for an expensive travel agency. Most of them will have a free form of service.
Now that you know what kind of firm you want, read our guide for small businesses on finding the right one.
Using these tools can be more complicated at first than using a regular travel website, but that does not last long because the long-term benefits are much greater than the time it takes to learn how to use them. Learn more here if you need more information.