This statistic may surprise you: we typically find over 25% of hotel invoices are wrong.
And according to a recent Global Business Travel Foundation survey, only 6 percent of company travel managers audit their negotiated hotel contract information monthly, and only 4 percent do so weekly.
The study found that about one in seven travel managers do not perform hotel rate audits at all.
If hotel invoice errors are so common, why aren’t travel managers performing audits more regularly? Of the travel managers in the GBT Foundation survey who said they did not perform audits, 42 percent cited the reason that they didn’t have the internal resources to do it. 16 percent said they didn’t have the budget to outsource the task.
Whether your business books 5 rooms or 500 room nights per month, regular auditing is critical for finding errors to make sure you don’t overpay for your lodging program.
In fact, when companies fail to double check expenditures, they’re paying 14 percent more on average than what was originally negotiated. If someone isn’t catching and disputing every hotel invoice discrepancy or making sure that hotels are honoring the negotiated contract rate, businesses could be overpaying by thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars each year.
A managed solution for auditing
Investing in a lodging management solution can help businesses with limited internal resources make sure they’re saving as much as possible on their travel program. Instead of having to go back and double check bookings or transactions to find the inevitable errors, a lodging management partner like CLC can streamline what is often a chaotic and costly reconciliation process to save both time and money.
CLC Lodging audits 100% of hotel invoices to check them against the negotiated contract rate--all before our members ever get the bill. We perform billing audits and hotel authorizations after every single transaction to track and prevent unauthorized charges, and provide consolidated, coded billing reports for full travel program visibility.
With CLC Lodging, you gain the peace of mind knowing that you’re paying exactly the negotiated rate for your hotel every single time so you can focus on making the most of your company’s travel investment.
And for those travel managers who said they didn’t have the budget to outsource their auditing process? CLC Lodging charges a one-time activation fee of $9.95 and a small nightly transaction fee for every hotel room booked. With our significantly discounted pre-negotiated member rates, it’s a no-brainer to let CLC Lodging do the hard work for you.