How to Create a High-Impact Travel Procurement Strategy

Your procurement team negotiated a 15% discount with a preferred hotel chain. Six months later, finance discovers that most travelers booked through consumer sites because the corporate tool was too slow and didn’t have the options they wanted. The discount existed on paper, but the savings never materialized.

A good travel procurement strategy would have prevented this outcome by evaluating vendors for user experience and content breadth alongside rate competitiveness. The difference between a basic and a high-impact travel procurement strategy often comes down to whether your strategy prioritizes what travelers will actually use.

This guide covers how to build a procurement strategy that delivers measurable savings. It covers everything from needs assessment and vendor evaluation through contract negotiation and continuous optimization.

What Is a Travel Procurement Strategy?

A travel procurement strategy is the approach your organization takes to sourcing, negotiating, and managing travel services. The traditional scope covers airlines, hotels, ground transportation, and TMC selection, with success typically measured by the discounts secured during contract negotiations.

What’s missing from this definition is the connection between strategy and the business outcomes a corporate travel department is meant to deliver. Cost savings are important, but so is traveler productivity, which is impacted by the time employees spend booking trips and filing expense reports instead of doing their actual jobs.

Other factors — such as duty of care, policy compliance visibility, and finance team efficiency _ all play a role in determining whether a travel program creates value or drains it. A high-impact procurement strategy addresses all of these dimensions, but realized savings remain the clearest measure of success.

5 Steps for Building a Travel Procurement Strategy

To build a high-impact travel procurement strategy, take the following steps:

1. Assess Your Current State

Before evaluating vendors or renegotiating contracts, you need an honest picture of how your current program performs. The goal isn’t to catalog every process and system, but to identify where the gap exists between your negotiated rates and your actual traveler behavior.

Start with these diagnostic questions:

• Do travelers frequently book outside approved channels?
• When they book outside policy, what is the reason? Is it price, convenience, options, or something else?
• Are your booking and expense systems integrated, or do travelers manage separate workflows?
• How long does it take an employee to complete a booking and file the associated expense report?
• Do you have visibility into travel spend across business units, or does data live in silos?

If your assessment reveals frequent out-of-policy bookings, the root cause is typically user experience or content gaps. Travelers don’t bypass corporate tools to be difficult. They do it because consumer sites are faster and offer more options. Addressing this issue requires prioritizing user experience and content breadth in your vendor evaluation.

Map your travel spend comprehensively before moving to vendor selection. This includes transient business travel, group bookings, meetings and events, and other company-sponsored travel. Identify all internal stakeholders involved in travel decisions, define clear ownership boundaries, and establish governance structures that prevent gaps.

2. Source and Evaluate Vendors Through Strategic RFPs

When evaluating corporate travel platforms, you can choose from two types of solutions: traditional travel management companies (TMC) or unified travel and expense (T&E) platforms like Navan. Navan integrates travel booking, expense management, and payments, with real-time data synchronization and automated expense reconciliation.

Once you’ve identified which type of solution fits your organization, use your request for proposal (RFP) to evaluate how well each vendor delivers on these critical capabilities:

• Technology capabilities that support your workflows, including mobile booking, AI-powered support, real-time data access, and seamless system connectivity.
• User experience that reduces friction in booking, expense filing, and disruption management. The platforms should also have the right balance of self-service and agent support to drive high adoption.
• Data and reporting that provide visibility into compliance, spend, sustainability metrics, and more.
• Integration depth with your existing systems — ERP, HRIS, accounting platforms, and payment systems — through pre-built integrations rather than custom development.
• Support models that scale from standard 24/7 assistance to white-glove service for executives.
• Cost structure that reveals total ownership costs beyond transaction fees, including implementation, training, ongoing management, and any future commitments.

For travel content requirements, it’s also helpful to specify the required inventory: GDS connectivity for full airline access, direct airline connections through NDC for competitive pricing, hotel content spanning chain properties and independent hotels, ground transportation options, and rail alternatives where relevant.

Navan’s platform aggregates GDSs, NDC connections, and online travel agency (OTA) content to help keep adoption rates high

Budget and contract terms should address the total cost of ownership beyond stated transaction fees. Request detailed breakdowns of implementation costs, training, and change management support, ongoing account management fees, and any volume commitments or minimum spend requirements.

3. Prepare for Contract Negotiations

Before starting contract negotiations, analyze your complete travel spend by supplier, route, destination, and booking lead time. Identify your top suppliers by volume and cost, and quantify leakage from bookings outside preferred channels.

This analysis reveals where consolidation opportunities exist and what adoption improvements would mean for your bottom line.

Balance Predictability with Competitiveness in Rate Structures

Static negotiated rates provide budget predictability through fixed discounts, while volume-based tiers create progressive discounts as your spend increases. For organizations that want more flexibility, dynamic pricing arrangements can adjust to market conditions while maintaining competitive positioning. The right mix depends on your travel patterns and risk tolerance.

Request Rate Competitiveness Guarantees

When your travelers find lower publicly available rates for the same hotel or flight, the supplier should match the rate or provide a credit. This provision makes policy compliance the path of least resistance, removing one of the primary reasons travelers book outside approved channels.

Formalize Performance Expectations in SLAs

Effective SLAs specify response times for booking requests and changes, accuracy rates for fare quoting, quality benchmarks measured through traveler satisfaction, and technology platform uptime requirements. Build flexibility provisions for market volatility, including review periods for rate renegotiation and clear data ownership guarantees.

4. Implement with Adoption as the Success Metric

The best contract terms and rates mean nothing until travelers start booking through the platform. That’s why the platform implementation process should treat adoption as the primary success metric from day one.

Address Reasons Travelers Book Outside Approved Channels

Start by addressing the reasons travelers book outside approved channels. If the previous tool was slow, emphasize speed during rollout communications. If it lacked options, highlight the expanded inventory. And if expense filing was painful, lead with automated receipt matching and faster reimbursements. The message to travelers shouldn’t be “use this because it’s policy” — it should be “use this because it’s better.”

Roll Out in Phases

The best practice around implementation is to roll out the new platform in phases to build momentum. You can start with a pilot group of frequent travelers who can provide feedback and become internal advocates. Make sure to address friction points before expanding company-wide.

Establish Cross-Functional Governance

Cross-functional governance structures impact implementation success. Travel managers commonly collaborate with security and risk management teams, followed by HR, finance and accounting, and procurement teams. The communication strategy should establish regular data-sharing cadences with key stakeholders.

Where necessary, create cross-department committees and working groups that review program performance quarterly. Share metrics relevant to each stakeholder group: cost optimization data for CFOs, compliance rates for finance teams, duty of care metrics for HR, and supplier performance data for procurement. When adoption dips, these cross-functional reviews help identify whether the cause is user experience, content gaps, or something else entirely.

5. Measure What Matters

Performance measurement separates programs that continuously improve from those that drift after implementation. Here’s what you should measure:

Financial Performance

You can track total T&E spend as the baseline for variance analysis, broken down by business unit, region, and cost center. Next, measure hard savings realized by comparing procurement-reported figures with actual spend in financial statements. Make sure to calculate your savings realization rate as the percentage of projected savings actually captured.

Operational Metrics

Track policy compliance rate as the percentage of bookings through approved channels. Also, monitor the advance booking percentage, which correlates with corporate travel savings. You can also measure online booking adoption versus agent-assisted channels.

The Adoption-to-Savings Relationship

Organizations with high adoption rates typically capture the majority of their negotiated savings, while those with low adoption realize only a fraction. This is why adoption metrics deserve equal weight with rate negotiations in your procurement strategy.

Quality Metrics

Beyond cost and compliance, track metrics that indicate whether travelers actually want to use your program. If the program is working correctly, you should see higher satisfaction and adoption rates.

Create a monthly scorecard tracking five metrics: total T&E spend versus budget, corporate card penetration rate, policy compliance rate, advance booking percentage, and traveler satisfaction. Distribute this scorecard to stakeholders within five business days of the month-end.