Out of all travel programme priorities, Payment and Expense (P&E) management is rated as the most important priority for travel buyers.
This was revealed in the latest Travel Buyer survey by BCD Travel Research & Intelligence, highlighting that 88% of the global travel buyers surveyed considered P&E management to be “extremely” or “very” important, compared with 76% in the 2021 survey.
For this survey, BCD looked at the payment and expense priorities and pain points of travel buyers, forms of payment offered by travel programmes, and payment and expense tools used.
The research company compared these insights with the results of the Payment & Expense survey it conducted in 2021 and traveller views collected in April 2023. The results are based on an online survey of 164 travel buyers from May 10-25.
75% of the travel buyers surveyed are focused on global travel programmes, 16% on regional and 9% on domestic travel.
Duty of care and traveller satisfaction remained the top two travel programme priorities, followed by cost control and policy compliance.
Other key findings
- More than half of travel buyers expect paperless expense solutions to become a new norm.
- They predict strict controls over traveller expenses and easy reconciliation of booking details with P&E data, leading to improved reporting.
- As part of P&E management, travel buyers rated simplifying processes as a main priority, 85% rating it as “extremely” or “very” important. Out of all priorities, gains in operational efficiencies or, in other words, indirect cost savings, increased its significance the most.
- Suppliers not accepting specific payment methods or charging extra fees is the top challenge for travel buyers, along with managing payment needs of non-employees.
- Managing service fees has become more complex.
- Fraud is a serious issue for travel buyers – it’s more important to them than it appears to be for travellers. A third of buyers have experienced fraud with central billed accounts. Four in ten buyers provide traveller education on the risks of credit card fraud.
