10 Mistakes Companies Make in Corporate Travel Management
(and How to Avoid Them with Synopsis)
Corporate travel is a critical part of doing business, but if not managed properly, it can quickly become one of the most time-consuming, costly, and risk-prone processes.
Too often, companies rely on outdated processes, disconnected tools, or ad hoc strategies. The result? Overspending, unhappy travelers, policy violations, and zero visibility into the business trip.
Let’s explore the 10 most common corporate travel mistakes—and how Synopsis, our travel management platform, offers the tools, visibility, and control you need to fix them for good.
#1 No Clear Travel Policy
Many companies operate without a formal travel policy, leaving employees to make their own decisions on how, where, and when to book. This leads to wildly inconsistent travel behavior, overspending, lack of control, and potential liability.
Synopsis empowers companies to define and enforce a company-wide travel policy with built-in controls. You can set rules for budgets, preferred vendors, cabin class, hotel star rating, trip approval flows, and so much more. By integrating with your HR systems and company policies, Synopsis automatically enforces these rules at the time of booking, ensuring consistency without manual oversight.
#2 Bookings Outside Approved Systems
When business travelers book flights or hotels on their own, the company loses control over cost tracking, policy compliance, and duty of care.
With Synopsis, all bookings go through a centralized platform, ensuring policy adherence. It also prevents off-platform bookings and consolidates all data in real time, giving travel managers full transparency and control.
#3 No Data or Analytics on Travel Spend
You can't improve what you don't measure. Many businesses fail to track essential KPIs like total spend, CO₂ emissions, or travel trends.
Our travel management platform offers powerful, real-time analytics dashboards showing tailored insights for spend patterns, carbon footprints, traveler behavior, and policy metrics. You can even filter by department, employee, route, or vendor, empowering smarter decisions and continuous improvement.
#4 Prioritizing Cost Over Traveler Experience
Cutting corners on flights and hotels might look good on paper but can frustrate employees, especially frequent travelers. Fatigue, long layovers, or low-quality stays can lead to dissatisfaction, turnover, and lost productivity.
Synopsis balances cost-efficiency with traveler comfort, offering smart booking suggestions that align with company policy and individual traveler preferences—creating a more human-centric travel experience.
#5 No Emergency Support
Unexpected disruptions, cancellations, or geopolitical events can leave travelers stranded, especially if there’s no structured support plan in place. Employees may not know how to act, costing the company both time and money.
Synopsis offers 24/7 live human support. Our experienced travel advisors are always reachable via in-app chat, ensuring immediate, personalized assistance wherever your travelers are. Whether it’s rebooking a flight, finding a new route, or making last-minute changes, your team is never alone. Duty-of-care features also allow managers to locate and support employees in real time during any crisis.
#6 Ignoring Sustainability Goals
As ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) requirements grow, companies that ignore their carbon footprint from travel fall behind in compliance and brand responsibility.
We help you track and manage emissions on every trip. With carbon reporting, sustainable vendor filters, and “green” booking nudges, Synopsis ensures your travel aligns with your sustainability goals—and lets you demonstrate it with data.
#7 Relying on Manual Processes
If your travel process still involves back-and-forth emails for bookings, approvals, and manual reimbursements, it creates inefficiencies, errors, and time loss.
Synopsis automates the entire process—from booking to approval to expense reconciliation. Approvers get real-time notifications, and travelers get instant feedback if something violates policy. It’s fast, error-free, and fully auditable.
#8 Poor Communication with Travelers
Poor communication leads to frustrated travelers, especially when they’re traveling in unfamiliar places or facing delays. If they don't know where to find support, it puts their safety and morale at risk.
With the Synopsis mobile app, employees have a reliable source of information that they can access through a single tap to check for policy guidelines, travel updates, and support—before, during, and after the trip.
#9 Disconnected HR, Finance, and Travel Systems
When travel systems operate in isolation from HR and finance teams, it leads to reconciliation issues, missed budgets, and broken workflows.
Synopsis seamlessly integrates with your HR, ERP, and finance policy, syncing traveler data, expenses, and policy enforcement across departments for smoother operations and automated workflows across the company.
#10 Waiting Until After the Trip to Handle Expenses
Many companies still rely on employees to manually gather, organize, and submit their travel expenses after the trip is over. This often leads to lost receipts, inaccurate reports, delayed reimbursements, and frustrated finance teams.
With Synopsis, expense management is no longer a painful, post-trip chore. Travelers can log expenses on the go, right from their phone. Snap a photo of the receipt, upload it, and it is automatically saved, categorized, and synced to the correct trip—within seconds. No more scrambling to remember where that taxi receipt went or digging through your wallet days later. Everything is captured in real time, creating accurate, timely reports for both travelers and finance teams.
By investing in the right tools and data-driven processes, you can transform business travel from a headache into a strategic advantage.
Get a future-ready travel management platform that simplifies bookings, ensures compliance, provides powerful analytics, and supports your travelers at every step.