A BCD Travel survey of 1,349 business travelers globally found that generating expense reports takes the most time.
The business travel payment and expenditure study examined payment methods, pain spots, and technologies to make life simpler.
79% of travelers use corporate credit cards. Personal cards (26%), cash (12%), and corporate payments to travel suppliers via bank transfers or lodge cards (16%) are also accepted.
Despite 26% familiarity with virtual cards, only 1% utilize them. Despite precautions, one in six business travelers have experienced credit card theft while traveling.
Business travel’s main payment and expenditure issues, according to BCD Travel.
“Companies looking to simplify payment for their travelers should explore the benefits of payment automation enabled by virtual credit cards,” said BCD vice president, Digital Payment and Expense Products Ajay Singh.
“Virtual payment automation simplifies central hotel and car booking payments. Each transaction produces a unique virtual card number and ties charges to a booking. This simplifies passenger payments and substantially eliminates fraud.
Staying within the reimbursement policy (29%), paying for trip expenditures (20%), and having local currency (20%) are the greatest payment pain points. Travelers face greater expense issues. Creating expenditure reports is the main difficulty area for 63% of respondents.
Collecting paper receipts (54%), multiple formats (52%), preserving receipts after the trip (51%), and expensing complicated categories like hotel stays with meals and other incidentals (50%), are further challenges.
Business travelers value process automation features like travel receipts automatically attached to their expense reports (76%), credit card transactions automatically matched to trip expenses (72%), and expense reports automatically pre-populated with trip data when booking their trip (67%).
Singh said BCD Pay, a cloud-based T&E spend management technology, can eliminate friction and pain points. “BCD Pay simplifies the process for business travelers who want to save time, improve payment data, and eliminate expense claims.
It helps travel management and finance teams maintain and improve corporate travel payment control, decrease manual labour, and obtain payment visibility.”