Learn to find cheap travel deals for you and your employees. Business travel can be costly if you don’t know how to play the travel game. 

If your company doesn’t already have established corporate rates with hotels in the cities where your employees frequently travel, call the hotels and set up an account. It’s as simple as a phone call.  Most hotels will give your employees an automatic 10-15% corporate discount for business travel stays. If the hotel rewards frequent stays with a frequent guest program, sign your company up for the program and register all employees through that program. 

If you leave the lodging decisions to your employees, set some standards. You’ll need to check the area rates in order to determine what reasonable rates are and limit your employees to a reimbursement of a set amount. Your employees can stay at an expensive hotel, but the added cost will come out of their pockets. This will encourage them to look for the cheapest travel deals and to push for better rates.

You’ll want to set similar limits for food, beverage, and car rental reimbursements.

Take advantage of discount travel Web sites. Discount travel sites allow you to choose from deals only available over the internet and they put travel costs right at your fingertips. On the other hand, if your employees must travel quite a bit, consider using a travel agent who can get you discounts through connections.

When looking for cheap air travel deals, you’ll want to play around with the travel dates.  Sometimes it’s worth it to send your employees a day early or ask them to stay a day late if it will save the company several hundred dollars in airfare. Consider scheduling meetings for a different day in order to accommodate a large difference in airfare costs. Work with your schedule and the airlines to find the most economical plan.

Finally, you may want to investigate alternative ways to handle communication in place of business travel. Will a teleconference do?  Can two trips be combined into one?  As technology improves and travel prices escalate, you may find that doing without a business trip can sometime be the most cost-effective decision of all.