Routespring is the Way To Go For Group Travel Booking!
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We cover travel costs for the presenters and rare disease patients spread out across the U.S. and Europe who attend our annual conference. In the past, we've implemented the usual "submit your receipt for reimbursement" method for travel costs. But as we've grown, this has become difficult to track and implement. We were looking for a one-stop-shop where attendees could book their flights, and we could pay for them automatically, eliminating that reimbursement step. We tried a few different platforms and finally found Routespring after another agency we thought was the answer dragged out our account setup process for almost two months. Anup and his team quickly solved our problem within a day, getting our account set up and functional right away, and were even able to tweak a few features on the backend to meet our particular needs. Many of our guests are not tech savvy, and Routespring's response time to those who needed help booking through the platform was phenomenal. We were able to quickly book everyone who needed a flight to the conference this year on their preferred airline, and the total for all ticket prices still came in under our planned budget.
Pros
- Customer service
- Cost management
- Traveler tracking
Cons
- It's hard to tell where to go to book a flight right after you create an account.
- It is a pretty basic design - I think they'd raise confidence in their tech skills even further if the site were a little flashier.
- The site is geared toward companies whose employees all have the same email address domain. However, they are able to accommodate different email addresses if you provide them so they can add the domains to your account.
Return on Investment
- This platform saved us many, many employee hours by eliminating the need to book flights for guests, track and approve travel receipts and dispense reimbursement.
- Our guests could easily book their flights in one place with a line of credit we were invoiced for weekly, with our credit card on file as a backup. For the first time ever, our travel planning is completely done two months before the Conference.
- We were able to set spending caps on ticket prices to stay within our budget, and we received notifications if anyone requested a ticket above the limit we set or tried to upgrade on our account.
Other Software Used
Hootsuite, Jotform, Squarespace, Bloomerang, DocuSign, SurveyMonkey, Asana, Zoom, Google Drive, Google Analytics
