Skift Take

After all of the time and effort it takes to create an engaging travel policy, having it be ignored by travelers can be frustrating. These five steps can help make your policy the best it can be and encourage travelers to engage with it.

This sponsored content was created in collaboration with a Skift partner.

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Effective travel policies can be tough to get right. While creating an engaging policy that employees will actually want to read is definitely an achievement, getting them to actually follow the rules within the policy is yet another challenge that companies often come across. Here are five ways travel managers can encourage their travelers to stay within corporate policy while burdening your travelers as little as possible:

1. Share it on relevant platforms your travelers actually use. Don’t be afraid to share your policy regularly, and encourage others to do the same. Once a travel policy is created, it’s important to distribute it on platforms that travelers already use throughout their everyday professional lives. That could mean sharing the document via company chat app, email, business app, or all of the above.

2. Actively encourage travelers to suggest what works and what doesn’t work in the policy. Just because you have a policy in place doesn’t mean it should be set in stone. Some policies will work right away, while others will likely need some tweaking to get it right. Creating an open forum that allows travelers to express what might improve their satisfaction can add to the effectiveness of an organization’s policy.

3. Offer travelers reasonings for the policies in place. Having rules in place just for the sake of having them won’t help the travel manager, their travelers, or the organization—travelers will immediately be put off. Make sure each policy is backed by its benefits and a corresponding reason for its existence. For example, encourage in-policy bookings by emphasizing the benefits of duty of care, and remind travelers that the sooner a traveler inputs their expense claims, the sooner they’ll be reimbursed.

4. Measure how the policy is working to proactively optimize it. Releasing a new travel policy to travelers and then forgetting about it, simply because it’s been written and uploaded, is one way to get travelers to ignore it. Instead, travel managers should measure the effectiveness of the policy after its launch to find out how large of an impact it’s having on traveler satisfaction and the organization’s bottom line. By tracking email opens, clicks, and time spent reading the document, adding up expense claims, surveying travelers, and tracking out of policy bookings, it’s possible to get a clear sense if the travel policy is actually effective.

5. Make good design a focus. All too often, travel policies are painfully boring, lengthy, and dry, making it a struggle for employees to get through. Creating a travel policy that gets across the message through powerful, visually engaging design can do a lot to push your travel policy forward and make employees actually want to read it.

To learn more about how to transform your travel policy into something your employees will actually read, download the eBook: “The Ridiculously Uncomplicated Guide to Creatinga Travel Policy People Will Actually Read (and Follow)

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This content was created collaboratively by Booking.com for Business and Skift’s branded content studio, SkiftX. 

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Tags: booking.com, corporate travel, digital, policy

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