Here are some of the most common challenges companies face when coordinating workforce travel:
1. Frequent schedule changes: Project timelines can shift unexpectedly due to weather, equipment delays, or scope adjustments. Crews may need to extend their stays, check in earlier, or rotate in and out of site work with little notice. Managing these moving parts manually can lead to missed bookings or extra costs for unused rooms.
2. Limited accommodation availability: Workforce projects often take place in regions with few lodging options nearby. In peak construction or turnaround seasons, local availability can tighten further, making it difficult to secure rooms that meet safety, comfort, or proximity requirements.
3. Administrative complexity: Coordinating travel for multiple crews, sometimes across several sites, can involve hundreds of reservations. Tracking who’s staying where, for how long, and at what rate quickly becomes cumbersome without a centralized system.
4. Inconsistent billing and reconciliation: Many hotels don’t provide the level of billing detail that corporate accounting teams require. This can lead to missing receipts, inconsistent rate structures, and time-consuming reconciliation at month-end, especially when each booking is handled individually.
5. Lack of visibility across projects: Without unified reporting, it’s difficult to see how lodging spend varies between locations or contractors. This limits an organization’s ability to forecast future needs or identify where efficiencies could be gained.
6. Communication gaps between field and office: Field supervisors often make decisions on the fly to meet project demands, but those updates don’t always make it back to administrative teams right away. That disconnect can create duplicate bookings or billing errors, especially when information is being tracked in multiple systems.
