Step 1: Gather Your Data
Before you evaluate anything, pull together the numbers. You'll want:
- Total travel spend by month and category (lodging, transport, meals)
- Number of invoices processed
- Number of unique suppliers
- Booking lead times
- Cancellation and change rates
- Support tickets or complaints
- Any manual workarounds your team has built
Here's a tip: Pay attention to how hard this step is. If pulling this data takes days of digging through inboxes and spreadsheets, that's your first finding. Good corporate travel management should make this information easy to get.
Step 2: Audit Your Policy
Start with the basics. Is your travel policy documented? Is it current? And does it make a distinction between corporate travel and crew travel?
A solid policy should cover:
- Nightly rate caps by location type
- Approved booking channels
- Required lead times
- Cancellation procedures
- Duty of care requirements
- Expense coding
If your policy treats a conference trip and a 20-person crew rotation the same way, something is slipping through the cracks. Maybe it's rate caps that don't reflect remote markets. Maybe it's coding rules that don't map to projects. Either way, a one-size policy usually creates leakage somewhere.
Want to go deeper on policy? See Corporate Travel Compliance.
Step 3: Audit Your Booking Process
Now look at how bookings actually happen, not how they're supposed to happen.
Is everything running through one centralized platform, or are coordinators juggling OTAs, direct hotel calls, and email requests? What percentage of bookings land within policy? How many need manual intervention? How long does a typical booking take from request to confirmation?
For crew travel specifically, ask:
- Are bookings being made with enough lead time?
- Is anyone maintaining an up-to-date crew list?
- Are duplicate bookings getting caught before they turn into no-show charges?
If the answers involve a lot of shrugging, your booking tool may not be built for crews.
Seeing some red flags already? Check out 5 Warning Signs Your Corporate Travel Platform Can't Keep Up With Your Crews.
Step 4: Audit Your Supplier Relationships
This is often where the biggest savings are hiding.
Take stock of how many hotel and lodging suppliers you're actively using, then dig in:
- Are you actually getting the rates you negotiated?
- Are your preferred properties available when you need them?
- Do you have backup options for remote project locations?
- Are hidden fees showing up that weren't part of the agreed rate?
Plenty of organizations find they're paying more than they thought, or leaning on suppliers that aren't delivering. And the cheapest nightly rate on paper isn't always the cheapest stay once you add fees, cancellations, and admin time.
More on that here: Why "Lowest Nightly Rate" Can Be Your Most Expensive Decision.
Step 5: Audit Your Payment and Reconciliation Process
How many invoices are you processing each month? How long does reconciliation take? Are costs landing on the right project, cost centre, or GL code? Are disputed charges dragging on for weeks?
Here's a benchmark worth holding yourself to: a well-run crew travel program should produce one consolidated invoice per project or billing period. Not dozens of individual hotel folios.
If reconciling a single project takes more than a few hours, that's not a people problem. It's a structural one.
For a sense of scale, one LodgeLink customer was handling more than 11,000 lodging invoices a year. After moving to consolidated billing, that dropped to 600, saving over 860 hours and more than $25,000 annually.
See how it works: How Direct Billing & Consolidated Invoicing Saves You 20+ Hours a Month.
