Following our series on Strategic Travel, we would like to share today our experience on creating a Strategic Travel Plan.

Why a Strategic Travel Plan is important

A Strategic Travel Plan brings different elements of your business together to proactively plan your upcoming business travel. Let’s take the example of TroopTravel’s Strategic Travel Plan. TroopTravel operates like hopefully many other businesses with strategic plan. In our case, we use the concept of the One-Page-Strategic Plan which we described earlier as part of our blog. This plan creates a set up targets we want to hit as a business as well as concrete steps on how to achieve them.

If your company, for example, wants to get globally operating management consulting companies as clients, you may want to consider having a management or sales team meeting either in London, Chicago or New York. London / UK is apparently the city with most headquarters of global management consulting companies.

Including this data point into your Plan is just one example on why a Plan is important for your business.

Key Components of a Strategic Travel Plan

The following elements should be part of every strategic travel plan:

• Basic Information: General information about recurrent in-person meetings, office locations, staff locations, etc. is the backbone of the Plan as well as the Company Layer of TroopTravel’s Strategic Travel Platform. If you have, for example, a meeting schedule TroopTravel’s system will be able to suggest meeting locations with relevant events happening at the same time then your planned meeting. Would you consider having a management meeting in a location where a key industry event is happening at the same time? Do you currently take this data points into consideration?
• Key Customer Information – This part of the plan brings key customer information in. This includes existing customers as well as strategic new clients. What about having a sales team meeting in a location with a high-density of potential strategic clients?
• Key Partner Information – This layer includes information about your key partners. Maintaining relationship is a key element of doing business. So next time, your engineer training is happening, why not considering do it in a location where you have key clients? You could ask your top engineers to pay the client a visit for a update on new functionalities of your product or just to make sure that all works well. Maintaining your existing customers accelerates profitable growth.
• Key Events Information – There are a number of events happening which you or your team may consider to attend. Would you select a location for a team meeting if at the same time there is a relevant industry event happening?

These different elements and layers are just a small portion of data points you may want to bring together.

If you are interested to learn more about TroopTravel’s Strategic Travel Platform and how to build a Strategic Travel Plan, please fill out this questionnaire and we will get in touch with you.