Corporate Travel Management: A Self-Service Guide for Ops Leaders

Your Sales VP just booked a flight outside the travel portal. Engineering forgot to add loyalty numbers again. Marketing's Q2 conference spend hit 140% of budget in April. Every trip triggers three Slack threads, two approval emails, and one fire drill when something goes wrong.

Operations leaders often become the company travel agent by default. Managing corporate travel shouldn't be your full-time responsibility, yet you spend hours each week fielding booking requests, approving expenses, and rebooking cancelled flights. This guide shows you how to get travel off your plate by giving each traveler their own AI assistant.

Why Managing Corporate Travel is a Bottleneck

Operations leaders at scaling companies face a specific problem. Travelers need help booking trips, but ops can't be available for every request. They're not travel agents. They're running operations.

The current system makes operations the single point of failure. Sales asks ops to book their client visits. Engineering wants ops to handle conference travel. Marketing needs approval for that trade show in Austin. Each request pulls operations away from actual operations work.

Companies often try self-service through consumer booking sites. But travelers still come to ops with questions. "Is this flight okay?" "Which hotel should I book?" "My meeting moved, can you rebook this?" Self-service fails when tools don't understand business travel or remember preferences.

Operations teams answer questions travelers could handle themselves. They discover policy violations during expense submission instead of preventing them during booking. They spend entire days managing disruptions when flights cancel. The corporate travel management system doesn't scale because operations ends up doing work each traveler could do on their own.

Building Self-Service That Actually Works

Self-service needs three things to work: 

• Booking experience easier than Expedia
• Policy compliance built in by default
• Tools that remember preferences. 

Get those right and travelers stop asking for your help.

Yet most self-service systems fail on convenience. Travelers book outside your portal because consumer sites feel faster, even when they're not. According to Harvard Business Review, employees book outside managed systems because they perceive they'll find better deals, not because they're trying to violate policy. Make your solution more convenient than Expedia and compliance follows naturally.

Self-service tools must enforce policy automatically without you reviewing every booking. "Book flights that get you to meetings on time" works better than abstract "book lowest logical fare" requirements. According to SAP Concur, successful policies specify cabin class by role and trip duration, set clear spending limits, and explain the reasoning. When travelers understand why economy class makes sense for two-hour flights but business class gets approved for overnight international trips, compliance happens without your involvement.

Preference memory solves the repetitive question problem. Travelers stop asking which airline or hotel to book when the system remembers their choices. They stop asking about loyalty numbers when those get applied automatically. They stop asking about seat selection when previous preferences carry forward.

Pro tip: Otto the agent handles booking through a conversational interface. Each traveler gets their own AI assistant that learns their preferences, enforces your policies, and handles disruptions. Otto becomes the executive assistant every business traveler needs but only Fortune 500 employees could afford until now.

Corporate Travel Management Implementation Playbook

Getting travel off your plate requires a staged rollout. In days, you can move from constant interruptions to managing by exception.

Audit Current State

First, map where you lose time and money. Review last quarter's travel expenses and you'll find specific patterns worth fixing.

Sales books last-minute because deals close unpredictably. Engineering forgets loyalty numbers while focusing on technical prep. Finance violates policy trying to save money but doesn't understand the real costs of non-refundable tickets.

Look for cost leaks:

• Cancelled non-refundable tickets when meetings shift
• Off-policy bookings because travelers couldn't figure out the "approved" option
• Duplicate bookings from miscommunication
• Forgotten seat preferences forcing rebooking conversations

Track time spent on routine requests. How many hours each week do you spend answering "which hotel should I book" questions? How often do you rebook cancelled flights that travelers could handle themselves?

Two hours reviewing expenses, two hours interviewing frequent travelers, two hours mapping current workflows gives you the complete picture. You'll have enough data to prioritize improvements without analysis paralysis.

Set Up Otto for Your Team

Getting Otto working across your team starts with policies. Define clear rules Otto will enforce automatically: economy class for flights under four hours, business class for overnight international, preferred hotels in cities your team visits frequently.

Otto learns these policies once and applies them for every traveler. You're not reviewing individual bookings. You're setting the framework Otto uses to guide travelers toward compliant choices.

Start with your highest-volume travelers who currently create the most work. Sales books the most trips? Get them on Otto first. That's where you'll see immediate time savings. Then roll out by team based on travel frequency.

Train teams through real scenarios. "Book a flight to Chicago for next Tuesday's client meeting." Otto walks them through the conversation, applies loyalty numbers automatically, and selects your preferred hotel near the client's office. 

Monitor your team’s use for the first few weeks and you'll spot patterns where travelers need clarity. Maybe sales doesn't understand the flexible ticket policy. Maybe engineering doesn't realize why certain hotels are preferred. Address these gaps through policy refinement, not individual booking reviews.

Travelers adapt quickly when tools actually work: Otto makes booking easier than asking you for help. 

Managing by Exception, Not Transaction

With Otto, operations stops handling individual bookings and starts managing the system. The role shifts from "book this flight for me" to strategic oversight and exception handling. This change happens across two areas: routine automation and strategic exceptions.

What Otto Handles Without Operations Involvement

Otto resolves routine disruptions directly with travelers. Flight gets cancelled at 10 PM? Otto presents rebooking options to the traveler. Meeting moves to the next day? Otto extends the hotel and adjusts the return flight. Travelers resolve these situations through conversation instead of emergency Slack messages to operations.

This automation extends beyond disruptions. Otto applies loyalty numbers automatically, remembers seat preferences, enforces policy during booking, and tracks receipts for expense submission. The system handles everything that doesn't require human judgment.

When Operations Gets Involved

Operations only engages when something truly needs strategic input:

• International travel requiring special approval or visa coordination
• Emergency trips outside normal policy parameters
• Policy violations that signal bigger budget or compliance issues

The volume drops dramatically. Instead of 20 booking requests per week, operations might handle 2-3 genuine exceptions that benefit from human oversight.

Real-Time Visibility Without Manual Tracking

Operations gains visibility while losing transaction work. Otto provides clear, formatted receipts that travelers can use for their expense documentation. Operations sees real-time data on who's traveling where and how much it costs. Marketing's conference spending spikes? Operations catches it in real-time, not during month-end close.

According to GBTA, companies with structured corporate travel management systems achieve 88% policy compliance and predict quarterly spend within 5% accuracy. With Otto, operations gets these outcomes without enterprise TMC contracts or dedicated travel staff.

Getting Started with Otto

Stop being your team's travel agent. Operations leaders often inherit this work by default, but you don't need to keep it.

Self-service works when travelers have tools that enforce policy automatically, remember preferences, and handle disruptions without your help. Otto gives each person their own AI assistant for business travel. 

Then you shift from handling transactions to managing the system. Booking requests drop by 80%. Disruption management happens without late-night Slack threads. Policy compliance improves because Otto prevents violations before they happen.

Try Otto for free to see how self-service corporate travel management gets travel off your plate so you can run operations instead.