For any busy business or even just a professional person, travel costs represent a large portion of your expenses budget. So any help in reducing these costs must be a very welcome thing and here we are looking at 5 of the best ways to do this. Once you realize that, with a little planning, you don’t need to be forking out anywhere near the level you have been you will never go back to the old ways.
Book Early
If you must use public travel as part of your operations it is best, as far as possible, to book as early as possible. If you are looking at flights or train travel then it’s well known that there are budget-priced seats available, but only in a limited number.
The reason for this is this allows the airline or rail operator to be able to advertise as seats to X location starting at $X, once these few low-priced tickets are gone the price skyrockets upwards.
Share Vehicles
Get your people to share vehicles wherever possible. Think about it, if half a dozen of you are traveling to the same meeting it makes no sense to take 6 cars, especially if it’s a local trip. If you make this standard practice, then over a year it will work out as a significant saving. This is true whether you supply company cars or pay mileage for use of their own vehicles.
Get Gas Discounts
The price of fuelling up company vehicles can be a huge burden, especially if you are paying the regular price at the pump. Don’t do this look into the various ways you can get yourself free gas cards and you will never be likely to pay full price again. The trick to this is making sure that your drivers are sure to use all these discounts to their fullest.
Use Pool Cars
One part of travel that is extremely expensive is the cost of running vehicles and there is a real way to avoid this completely. There are different ways to acquire vehicles, you can buy them and then you own them outright, but this is expensive in the first instance. You could lease them, which gives you a cheaper method, but you never have the vehicle as an asset.
Thirdly why not buy older, 2nd hand, vehicles? This is cheap but is a risk as you may end up with costly repair bills and lost time. But the one way we can control this cost is by having fewer vehicles in the fleet, this can be achieved by having pool cars that are used as they are needed rather than individual company vehicles for each employee.
Go Electric
Technology is changing cars so much and one way you can save in so many ways by going electric. The fuel costs are significantly lower for one thing and, depending on where you live, there are often grants and discounts available to purchase vehicles. You can also gain good PR by being able to promote yourself as an environmentally conscious company.
