HR & corporate travel: What you need to know

29 Jul 2025 · 8 MIN READ

Seamless, modern business travel involves more than booking flights. Employees’ safety, satisfaction and wellbeing are all crucial and need to be supported at every stage of their trip. This makes HR’s role more prominent and important than ever before.
A major factor for this is the importance of travel to job satisfaction. 84% of those surveyed for Business Travel News’ Traveler Experience Index said business travel plays a key role in their job satisfaction , making it a significant consideration for employee wellbeing and retention.
In this article, Nick Roberts will walk through the ways U.S.-based HR managers can lead on employee travel management, from safety and wellbeing guidelines, to how Perk can streamline processes, reduce costs and support your team.

HR responsibilities for business travel

Person writing in a notebook at a wooden table with a laptop open, wearing glasses and a blue sweater, near a window with green plants outside.

From compliance to contingency planning and dealing with emergencies, many existing HR skills are perfectly positioned to support U.S. organizations in building and implementing safe, efficient, and employee-centered travel policies.
The following examples show how core HR skills can bring clarity and organization to existing travel management policies:
Risk management isn’t just for the workplace. HR professionals can use the same risk assessment methods to identify potential hazards during travel and plan for contingencies like delays, severe weather, and accidents.
Even before they leave, HR teams play a key role in supporting employees with travel preparations, including documentation, visas and insurance. Providing hands-on support throughout the stages of travel can ensure trips run smoothly.
A core of HR is to establish duty of care requirements and ensure they are met. This means creating clear expectations around traveler safety, and outlining response protocols.Effective duty of care for travel should make individuals feel equally well supported wherever they are working from.
Effective travel policies, procedures, and best practices will only work if employees understand them. Focused training sessions should be held that walk employees through booking procedures, safety protocols, and the company’s travel tools .Building confidence with reminders and checklists will help to boost compliance.

Building travel management into your HR strategy

List of six business travel management steps on a white box against a blue sky with clouds background. 1. assess your current travel approach. 2. create a new business travel policy. 3 manage duty of care for traveling employees. 4 choose the right travel management platform. 5 train the entire team on new processes. 6 continue to refine and update your travel policies

1. Assess your current travel approach

Before making changes, get a full picture of how travel is currently handled across your organization. Determine which departments manage tasks like booking, check historical travel spend, and assess the suitability of existing budgets . 
Try to understand why processes have developed the way they have and the existing pain points for both the company and individual travelers.
Forming a clear understanding of the current approach means you’ll be able to clearly define the goals and scope of a more strategic, HR-led travel approach.

2. Create a new business travel policy

A clear travel policy for business brings clarity and confidence for the whole team, as everyone involved in travel will have a clear framework to work in.Your travel policy should guide employees and outline processes for the following:

Safety and risk protocols

Outline the steps that will be taken at each stage of travelling for work. This includes pre-travel risk assessments, insurance, emergency procedures, and destination-specific guidance for both U.S. and international destinations.

Booking and approval processes

Clarify who is responsible for booking travel and the approved platforms they should use. Demonstrate the approval process and remind travelers who are booking travel independently when approval requests will be required.

Preferred vendors

List any airlines, hotels, rental car companies, or other services your company prefers to use for travel bookings. This is often to make use of negotiated rates or integration with your travel platforms.

Expense reporting

Set expectations for expense tracking and submission. For example, is using a company card preferred over reimbursement? Are itemised receipts required? Which expenses will the company cover ?
Perk can help to automate all of the above processes, creating a customized policy in minutes. Once your policy is complete, make sure that budgeting and compliance are approved by other departments to ensure transparency and buy-in.
If you need additional support when creating your policy, try using Perk’s business travel templates to get started.

3. Manage duty of care for traveling employees

The Occupational Health and Safety Act 1970 requires U.S. employers to provide a workplace free from recognized hazards that could cause serious harm. While the Act doesn't specifically address work-related travel, employers are encouraged to take reasonable steps to assess and reduce risks during such travel, particularly when it is part of the employee's job duties.
Ultimately, employee wellbeing is an HR responsibility, wherever in the world the employee works. While cost will be a major consideration with other departments, make sure that the staff wellbeing is prioritized at every stage, with a clear duty of care policy to provide guidance in emergency situations both within the U.S. and overseas. 
An effective duty of care policy will demonstrate that the correct steps have been taken to protect traveling team members. For this reason, the level of detail should be high, ensuring that specific guidance is provided for any work-related scenario, such as different events like conferences or training retreats.

4. Choose the right travel management platform

Perk is an all-in-one management solution that streamlines every aspect of travel management:
  • Easy booking for flights, accommodation and transport
  • Real-time spend tracking
  • Custom spend reporting
  • Centralized data with an easy-to-use interface.
Read on to learn more about how HR teams can benefit from using Perk as their travel management platform.

5. Train the entire team on new processes

Your new policy and tools can only be effective if there is confidence in how to use them. Provide training to all staff members, as even those not traveling may be involved in budgeting or planning future trips.
Hold regular refresher sessions when a trip is coming up, to make sure the key information is fresh in their minds and that new hires are also up to speed.
Make sure that training is practical so that everyone understands how to make requests, input bookings and update details. Emphasize that the policies and processes are intended to make travel as simple and safe as possible.

6. Continue to refine and update your travel policies

Treat travel policies as living documents. Regular revisions will ensure that shifting business goals are factored in and that employee feedback can be used to refine and improve the travel experience.
With Perk, every trip’s data is stored centrally, making it easy to access when creating custom reports. Use this information to identify budget overspends or inefficiencies in the booking process. Employee input will identify pain points that may require adjustments, while periodic review with management will ensure that changes are universally understood.
Through this refinement of training, learning and optimizing, your strategy can remain relevant and employee-focused.

How Perk helps HR teams with travel management

Purple infographic with icons and text: Automated approvals, Manage bookings from a central dashboard, Real-time risk alerts, Flexible reporting, Flexibility.

Perk combines booking, compliance, support, and safety into one streamlined platform, offering a corporate travel management solution that gives HR teams visibility without the need for micromanagement.
By automating manual processes and enforcing travel-related policies, Perk helps HR teams to focus on developing and improving strategy, policy and employee experience, rather than logistics.
Here are some of the ways HR teams can benefit from using Perk:

Automated approvals

After you integrate your policy into the Perk platform, your rules, budget limits and approval processes can all be implemented automatically.
The platform flags any bookings outside your preset policies for manual review, giving you oversight while avoiding micromanagement.

Manage bookings from a central dashboard

With Perk, every flight, hotel, car rental, and train reservation is managed in one place.
This gives HR, finance, and other departments full visibility of current and past bookings, making it simple to manage existing travel and learn from previous travel trends.

Real-time risk alerts

From weather warnings to flight delays and cancellations, disruptions are inevitable.
Instant updates from Perk will give HR teams as much time as possible to act quickly when travel advisories emerge, keeping employees safe and minimising disruption to the existing travel plans.

Flexibility

Plans change, and Perk helps you to stay flexible. FlexiTravel allows you to cancel just hours before departure and still recover most of the costs.
24/7 customer support is also available to help with employees with last-minute changes, emergencies, or booking help whenever you need it.

Flexible reporting

Perk’s reporting dashboards let you break down spend by multiple categories, helping you to quickly produce reports based on transport types, expenses, cancellations among others. Your customized dashboards can be used to track exactly what matters most to your organization.
Once you have set up your reports, they can be scheduled automatically to help you stay on top of budgets and compliance.

Simplify business travel with a single travel management platform

Business travel doesn’t need to be complicated. Many of the key skills and approaches used by HR teams align with the levels of safety, efficiency and duty of care required for effective travel policies.
With an all-in-one travel management platform like Perk in place, your operations will be centralized, ensuring HR teams can focus on reducing risk, providing support and developing a smoother travel experience for everyone.
Book a demo to see Perk in action, or check out our corporate travel safety guide to learn how Perk supports U.S. business travelers.

Written by

Nick Roberts
Nick Roberts

Growth Marketing Director

Nick Roberts is Growth Marketing Director at Perk, where he brings deep experience from high-growth tech to the world of business travel. With a sharp commercial lens, he’s focused on helping modern companies travel better.
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