Caudalie

How Caudalie Italy cut travel chaos and shadow work using Perk

If you manage travel for work, you probably know this feeling: even if your job title says office manager or travel manager, most days you’re swamped chasing receipts, solving trip issues for employees at 8pm, or managing invoices in three different systems.

That ‘work behind the work’ is what we call shadow work: the endless stream of invisible tasks that keeps things running but pulls you away from the real work with real impact. 

At Caudalie Italy, shadow work was burying its office manager and preventing her from doing the job she was hired to do.

An office manager running every single trip

For Iolanda Spica, Caudalie Italy's office manager in Italy, the shadow work around travel for work was suffocating. She was spending hour after hour booking and managing trips for more than 70 field agents visiting pharmacies around Italy, as well as for the marketing team and leadership traveling to France for meetings with the headquarters.

Employees would call, text, or ping her on WhatsApp all day:

“I need a hotel near this pharmacy.”

“Can you book a train for tomorrow?”

“I’m going to Paris; what’s the best option?”

For Iolanda, each request meant:

1. Stopping what she was doing

2. Manually searching for options online

3. Comparing prices

4. Contacting hotels directly or booking on consumer sites

All of this was preventing her from focusing on her other tasks as office manager, and from spending time on more strategic work.

With just one person managing every single trip, and more and more field agents joining the team, they needed a scalable solution that made travel run quietly in the background instead of consuming their time.

Policies on paper, not in practice

Caudalie Italy’s travel policy was written into employment contracts: €100 per night for hotels, €30 for dinner.

Anyone who’s tried to enforce a flat hotel cap in a big city will recognize this problem. In cities like Milan, Rome, and Florence, it simply wasn’t realistic. “With €120 in Milan, there’s nothing,” says Iolanda.

In practice, Iolanda was manually checking every trip, making judgment calls, and escalating exceptions to her manager.

The result:

• Policies existed on paper, but not in the day-to-day booking process.

• Any time a trip fell outside the policy, Iolanda had to dig for alternatives and escalate the booking, piling even more shadow work onto her plate.

No visibility into spend

On the finance side, things weren’t much easier for the team. Iolanda used a single corporate credit card for every transaction, from hotel bookings to office supplies. 

Without meaningful breakdowns, each month Iolanda would go line by line through statements. 

Highlighting rows.

Copying into spreadsheets. 

Trying to separate travel from everything else so they could get a rough idea of how much was spent on company travel. 

There was no clear travel budget, just fluctuating spending that spiked in busy months like September, October, and November.

It was clear to Iolanda and her team that this way of managing travel wasn’t sustainable.

The turning point: “Something from paradise” lands in the inbox

The change started with a simple email.

Iolanda received an introductory message about Perk. The timing was perfect. “It was the right time. I thought, why not? There was a three-month pilot, and I told my boss: we can try, and in three months we’ll see.”

This trial made Caudalie Italy realize there was a better way to manage travel and spend. As Iolanda puts it, using Perk “is a dream.”

Why did it feel like such a relief? Several things made Perk the right choice for Caudalie’s team.

A smooth and supported onboarding

Caudalie Italy’s implementation and traveler training sessions were run in Italian, which was crucial for adoption.

Implementation took about two months, during which the whole team was supported by onboarding and implementation specialists. 

With different levels of tech-savviness on the team, Perk made sure learning curves were respected, so everyone — from leadership to field agents to Iolanda herself — felt confident using the tool.

Once the team was onboarded and comfortable using Perk, the impact on Iolanda’s day-to-day workload became obvious.

Iolanda gets more time, and travelers get more freedom

When asked how much time Perk saves her on a scale of 1 to 10, Iolanda doesn’t hesitate:

The reduction of shadow work for her is clear:

• Fewer calls and WhatsApp messages

• Manual hotel searches for Iolanda are now the exception, not the rule

• No more juggling 15-20 different websites to book a trip

And what about traveler experience?

When asked what travelers think of booking their own trips, she added:

Perk’s inventory also made a difference for agents traveling across Italy, as Iolanda points out:

As travelers got more freedom to book on their own, it became even more important to make sure the company’s policies were built into the booking process.

A flexible travel policy and automated approvals

Caudalie Italy moved from having their travel policy in a printed document to setting it up inside Perk’s platform, so all travelers can see what’s in policy while booking their trip. Instead of hard-coding unrealistic caps, they easily configured flexible ranges, adding a higher ceiling (up to €300) in expensive cities like Milan or Rome.

When a trip goes over the typical range, Perk routes it to Iolanda for review. She checks the context and, if needed, adds a short note for her manager (e.g., “It’s high season in Rome; there is nothing cheaper”).

Perk’s dynamic policy controls and inventory have already led to real savings on trips over the course of 12 months:

• €5,880 in policy savings across hotels, trains, and car rentals

• €1,900 in flight policy savings

Clarity and control over spend

In the first year, Caudalie Italy paid for travel via credit card, but the team quickly realized they could go further.

Iolanda pushed to switch to bank transfer billing with Perk. Since then, all spend has been consolidated into monthly invoices, broken down by category: stays, trains, and flights.

This is a major shift from manually scanning generic card statements and guessing what was travel and what was office spend. Now she has more time to focus on the core parts of her role as an office manager.

​​With invoices cleaned up and spend clearly categorized, Caudalie Italy could finally turn that data into real insight.

Now, Caudalie Italy can see:

• How much they spend on travel

• Where that money goes (by category and period)

• How peaks in travel affect the budget

The goal for next year is clear: a dedicated, predictable travel budget for a growing commercial team, with Perk’s data as the foundation.

Support that feels like an extension of the team

Iolanda is in close contact with her Perk Account Manager. “I write to our Account Manager more than two or three times a week and she’s always there to help. The support and assistance are great" she explains.

Customer care has also stepped in at crucial moments. Knowing there’s a 24/7 team behind every trip gives Iolanda real peace of mind, knowing travelers are looked after when plans go wrong.

Iolanda particularly remembers that time she had to change a train ticket minutes before departure via chat. “I just wrote: ‘Sorry, the train is leaving in 20 minutes, I need to change it.’ And they handled it. Really great.”

For Caudalie Italy, Perk doesn’t just handle bookings. It frees Iolanda from constant shadow work, lets travelers book confidently on their own, and provides the business with the travel and spend insights they need to build a travel program that truly works for them.

What Perk provided

• Dynamic and automated travel policies 

• Consolidated travel booking processes

• A self-booking platform for employees

• Advanced travel reporting