How to Manage Executive Travel Itineraries

Managing executive business travel itineraries can pose a real challenge. If you slip up in just in just one aspect, the trip can fail to meet its goals and busy executives will hold you responsible. This does not just mean hitting all the meetings and transport options on time but also ensuring it is all done in the right style, paying attention to local conditions and taking the individual executive’s tastes and working practices in to account. This week’s post gives you some ideas to ensure that itinerary management is a success every time.

Take preferences in to account

A good itinerary is tailored to the individual rather than constructed based on a model. Put another way, it should take the executive’s preferences, lifestyle and routines in to account and suit them as an individual. Some may prefer to sleep in a hotel the night before an early meeting, others prefer to stay with their family until the last moment and catch the red-eye flight.

People have different preferences for baggage (travel light or travel with checked-baggage), specific hotels or airlines and others just prefer things to happen as quickly as is possible. From the perspective of a travel manager, there are a number of things that you can do to ensure that you create tailored itineraries without too much effort. The first thing is to put your own feelings aside; you may think it’s pointless to carry a printed ticket when you could email a version direct to the executives smartphone, if that’s what your executive wants, you’ve got to do it.  Secondly and perhaps more importantly, invest some time in finding out what each individual likes and then record the information somewhere.

Sequencing of events

The order that events will take place on a business trip should be the main focus for planning an executive’s itinerary. Make a timeline and include all activity, including the small things such a dinner. Ensure you allow time for travel and a small amount to ensure that the critical timings are met.

Appropriate guide

You should produce a short easy to read guide for the itinerary. Try and use headings and avoid making things too complicated – you executives are busy people. Ensure timings and contact details are clearly marked and, where possible, go for short bulleted lists to convey more information.

It’s also essential to include ‘what if’ details for the event that something goes wrong. They need to know who to call, 24 hours a day, to solve a problem and similarly, they need to be able to inform people if they’re going to be late or miss something vital. Once you got all the information, in the correct form, it’s a great idea to save it as a PDF and email it to the executive’s smart phone (if security considerations allow), that way they’ll always have it with them.

Philadelphia Limousine is a corporate and luxury ground Transportation Company that is really proud of our business clients and safety record. We hope that you find these short tips useful in some small way. We o private and business transportation needs in Philadelphia, New Jersey, Delaware and New York. We would love to hear from you to see if we could offer a better limo service to support your needs.