Routespring is the Way To Go For Group Travel Booking!
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We cover travel costs for the presenters and rare disease patients spread out across the U.S. and Europe who attend our annual conference. In the past, we've implemented the usual "submit your receipt for reimbursement" method for travel costs. But as we've grown, this has become difficult to track and implement. We were looking for a one-stop-shop where attendees could book their flights, and we could pay for them automatically, eliminating that reimbursement step. We tried a few different platforms and finally found Routespring after another agency we thought was the answer dragged out our account setup process for almost two months. Anup and his team quickly solved our problem within a day, getting our account set up and functional right away, and were even able to tweak a few features on the backend to meet our particular needs. Many of our guests are not tech savvy, and Routespring's response time to those who needed help booking through the platform was phenomenal. We were able to quickly book everyone who needed a flight to the conference this year on their preferred airline, and the total for all ticket prices still came in under our planned budget.
Pros
- Customer service
- Cost management
- Traveler tracking
Cons
- It's hard to tell where to go to book a flight right after you create an account.
- It is a pretty basic design - I think they'd raise confidence in their tech skills even further if the site were a little flashier.
- The site is geared toward companies whose employees all have the same email address domain. However, they are able to accommodate different email addresses if you provide them so they can add the domains to your account.
Likelihood to Recommend
Routespring is definitely well suited for companies looking to keep track of all of their employee travel in one place, set a cap on spending for flights, provide reports when needed on travel costs and eliminate the need for employees to collect multiple receipts to turn in for travel reimbursement at the end of a trip. It is a simple platform to use once you get the hang of it, which really doesn't take that long if you are even mildly tech-savvy. As a non-profit with guests who were booking travel to our annual conference from all over the world, we did run into a few things that didn't quite fit (ex: couples booking together have to choose their spouse under the "employees" tab, and we had to make certain we had every single email address domain name our guests were using entered on the backend, so they were able to book with that email address). But these were small details and not deal breakers for us using the platform.