Face-to-face meetings remain one of the best ways to build relationships, generate ideas and drive business growth. For many business travellers, though, the time spent organising transport, finding a meal and managing expenses can be a big drain on productivity and energy.
If you need to be somewhere at a specific time you often spend more time worrying about the logistics of getting there than on preparation for whatever event or meeting you are attending. Perhaps you are visiting an unfamiliar city and face the challenge of navigating the local transport options. Or if you’re relying on an unfamiliar local taxi company, you may face long wait times and little certainty over the type of vehicle that will turn up.
Once you’ve arrived at your accommodation, you may be hungry after a long journey – so the next task is to find a meal that will keep you going. The local corner shop that offers cold sandwiches and snacks doesn’t always cut it. Equally, you don’t want to walk around spending time trying to find the right restaurant.
But the unproductive use of time doesn’t end there. Once the trip is over, the expense claims have to be dealt with. Time may be spent gathering paper receipts and filling in forms. Then there’s the processing time occupying travel managers and finance teams, who need to review, approve and reconcile multiple expense claims. Not to mention handling any disputed claims.
What businesses need is a quick and reliable way of booking a ride and ordering food that takes the strain away from travellers. Ideally it should also avoid the post-trip loss of productivity – by automating the expense process.
Focusing on your work
By bringing together transport, meals and expense management in a single app, we’re helping to remove much of the friction from this travel experience so that travellers can focus more on work tasks rather than worrying about logistics.
We found that users of our own Uber for Business platform say they are more productive now that they are using it. In a recent survey of business travellers, 51% of employees said that Uber’s convenience and ease of use means they can spend more time focusing on important work tasks.
Frequent travellers, who take more than 10 trips a month through Uber for Business, save an average of 33 hours a year – equivalent to more than four working days – through faster booking, shorter wait times, more efficient journeys and simplified expenses.
Business travel will always involve time on the move. But this can be turned into productive working time – whether that’s preparing for a meeting, catching up on emails or simply getting yourself ready to perform at your best
