How do you outsource your business travel?

Booking a business trip is rarely a single action. You compare flights, you work out whether the connection is realistic, you look for a hotel close enough to the meeting, you sort out transport from the airport into the city, and then you have to find all of it again on the morning you leave.

Look for help with that, and you mostly run into corporate travel agencies. They are built for organisations with a travel policy, a contract and a booking system of their own. If you travel a few times a year you fall outside that. Too small for the contract, and not keen on spending your evenings comparing options. That is the gap a virtual assistant can fill.

What does a virtual assistant arrange for your trip?

In practice it is more concrete than it sounds. A virtual assistant takes over:

• Flights and hotels. Compared and booked on price, travel time and the number of connections.
• Transport on the ground. A hire car, a transfer or train tickets, sorted before you land.
• An itinerary. Time zones and room between meetings, with every time, address and confirmation in one view on your phone.
• Paperwork in time. A check on whether you need a visa or a valid passport, and which confirmations you have to carry with you.
• Receipts together. Bookings, receipts and confirmations in one place for your bookkeeping and your expense claim.

What else sits under this service is set out on the travel management page. When a trip starts to collide with the rest of your week, planning and organisation usually belongs with it.

What does outsourcing your business travel cost?

The work runs on monthly packages of hours, not on a fee per booking. Ten hours a month costs 840 euro, twenty hours 1600 euro, forty hours 3000 euro and sixty hours 4200 euro, all excluding VAT.

That monthly adjustment matters more than it sounds, because travel comes in waves. A run of trade fairs in spring, then months where you go nowhere. In the quiet months those same hours go to administration or your calendar, because you buy one package of hours rather than a separate service per trip.

If you are unsure about the number of hours, how many hours you need will help. What else sits in a package is covered in what does a virtual assistant cost.

Travel agency or virtual assistant, which fits you?

There are three routes and none of them is wrong. It comes down to how often you travel and to what has to happen when something goes wrong on the road.

If your company travels a lot, wants negotiated rates and someone reachable at any hour when a flight is cancelled, a travel agency is simply the better choice. A virtual assistant is not a replacement for that. The difference is scale: at a few trips a year, a contract and a booking system do not pay for themselves, and one steady person doing the legwork is the more practical answer.

How do you hand a trip over?

It starts with what you already know, and that is usually enough to begin.

1. You say where you have to go, when you need to be there and when you want to be back.
2. You pass on your preferences: which airport you leave from, how many connections you accept, what kind of hotel you want and whether you would rather fly early or late.
3. You get a few options side by side, with price, travel time and connections listed. You choose.
4. After your choice it gets booked and the itinerary lands on your phone, with every time, address and confirmation in it.
5. Passport and visa are checked while there is still time to arrange something.
6. Receipts and confirmations end up in one place, so the expense claim afterwards is not a treasure hunt.

The decisions stay with you. What goes away is the comparing, the booking and the hunting for confirmations. If you do not yet know where to start with outsourcing, which tasks you can outsource lays out the options. If your calendar works against you as well, outsourcing calendar management is the logical second step.

Last updated: 15 September 2026