Unleash the Benefits of a Workforce Mobility Platform & Reclaim Your Time With LodgeLink

If you’re a travel manager or a seasoned finance professional whose dealt with workforce travel, you’ve likely dealt with the troubles of crew travel too.

You probably know all the pain points associated with booking accommodations for crew travel all too well — managing non-traditional schedules, group bookings, room rate negotiations, and limited property matches in the areas your crews are travelling to.

For many travel managers, the solution to these problems has often been randomly searching for hotels within the desired location and hoping for the best.

LodgeLink’s crew travel technology offers all of the benefits of a mobile workforce mobility platform to help ease the process of planning travel for crew workers.

Here are 8 of the ways that working with LodgeLink can improve your crew travel program to restore your time, money, and peace of mind.

Booking accommodations for your crews doesn’t have to feel like playing chess. LodgeLink gives your organization the ability to:

• Book one or multiple crew members and accommodate different timetables in one reservation through our advanced scheduling tools
• Assign user types to ensure travel policy compliances are followed
• Set up Preferred Properties to pin your favorite hotels or lodges so you can find them easier for your next booking

Not all booking and searching platforms are created equal. You may need to put crews in remote and challenging locations with nary a hotel to be found. So how do you solve that “404 – No Hotels Found” error?

LodgeLink has the solution. Allowing for Legal Subdivisions (LSD) GPS tracking capabilities, our crew travel platform can put your crews where they need to be by finding the closest accommodations to your remote worksite.

Additionally, as a Black Diamond Group company, LodgeLink has access to work camps and lodges not found on any other online platform.

It’s time-consuming to manage crew members coming in and out of the site. Maintaining multiple spreadsheets and monitoring the whereabouts of your team can easily be a full day’s work if you’re not experiencing the benefits of a workforce mobility platform. 

Help ensure your crew is safe, sound and accounted for by uploading your own crew lists prior to breaking ground. Uploading crew lists also saves time when making complex reservations because you can easily select your crew members from an updated list rather than entering names one at a time.

The payment process of crew travel can chip away at your time by going back and forth with multiple hotels and crews to figure out your organizations’ expenses.

Every finance professional knows the lengthy, frustrating process of handling disputes, which crew member stayed where, exactly what was spent, and tracking down invoices for timely payment.

LodgeLink’s platform simplifies payment processes and resolves reconciliation headaches, providing a streamlined approach through:

• Consolidated invoicing, so you only get one invoice that reconciles multiple stays from multiple properties
• Payment IDs and Tracking Codes to mirror cost centers, GL codes, AFE#, and PAD# to align to your accounting and budget requirements
• Seamless alignment with accounting practices, adding better visibility to your budget and layers of financial control and efficiency

When things go wrong, it’s important to have a plan in place. With LodgeLink’s Duty of Care offering, you can track and communicate with your crews in the event of an emergency.

Benefit from Duty of Care features that allow your team to react quickly and effectively during a potential safety risk, such as:

• Optimal customer service
• GPS tracking to locate travellers
• Traveller location reports and flight monitoring
• Emergency communication initiation

Our 24/7 customer support, certified travel advisors, and expertise in negotiations and groups discounts streamline crew travel. 

In short, we put more time back into your workday, find you better rates, and make planning workforce travel easier.

Start capitalizing on the benefits of a workforce mobility platform. Work with LodgeLink to start improving your project planning and better manage your travelling crews.

*This blog was originally published on September 27, 2023. It was updated on January 22, 2024.