“The advantage of Lanes & Planes is that EVERYTHING comes from one tool”.

With Lanes & Planes, Covivio is driving a fully digitalised business travel management. In this customer story, you will learn how the real estate company has structured its processes, minimised its credit card spend and automated its approval processes.

Covivio is one of the largest real estate companies in Europe. Whether office properties in Italy and France, hotels in many European countries or flats and commercial units in Germany: Covivio rediscovers spaces, combines working, travelling and living with each other and develops contemporary concepts of living together.

With five locations in Germany and others in France, Covivio’s employees are on the road a lot.

We spoke to Robin, Digital Coordinator at Covivio, to find out more about how they use Lanes & Planes and the benefits they get from it.

Robin is responsible for the digitalisation of processes in his company. He scrutinises existing processes and optimises them, especially the manual ones.
As the company grew, Robin became increasingly aware of the inefficiencies in the business travel processes. Frequent travellers booked their trips using their company credit card. For employees who travelled infrequently, the HR department worked with a travel agency. In addition, employees booked their train journeys via DB and hotels were reserved via the usual platforms, such as Booking.com.

Searching for a solution

With the aim of digitalising travel management and speeding up workflows, Robin set out to find a suitable solution.

Although some of the employees were very experienced in organising and booking trips and had also already saved some hotels as favourites, the time required for booking was still too high. Thanks to the use of Lanes & Planes, the effort was significantly reduced.

Regain control of travel expenses

The travel expense report was a particular thorn in Robin’s side. It was done, quite classically, with Excel. There were even several Excel spreadsheets, which made a structured and clear travel expense report almost impossible.

Before becoming Digital Coordinator at Covivio, Robin was a desk officer for the Chief Financial Officer. In this role, he accompanied the internal audit. So he is very familiar with the monthly ordeal of travel expense and credit card claims.

The use of direct debit has also significantly reduced the number and thus the cost of corporate credit cards.

The printing of Excel sheets that had to be edited manually beforehand and signed by hand afterwards particularly annoyed Robin. 

“Submitting documents in paper…it’s just not up to date anymore.”

Simplified travel expense report

At Covivio, the HR department is responsible for the travel expense report and its audit. The complete digitisation of travel expenses has meant that the department no longer has to enter anything manually. The data is all provided digitally after it has been checked and automatically uploaded through an interface with SAP. Tediously searching through sources of error in Excel – this is now a thing of the past at Covivio.

Covivio’s policies require downstream control of travel bookings and their settlements, so it sometimes took up to a month between travel and payment. Now, the digitalisation of the travel expense report makes approval a breeze and can be given promptly simply by pressing a button.

Travel policies and permits

Also the approvals and respective confirmations of processes in travel management were just annoying for Robin.

Managers often had to take one last look at travel dates before final bookings could be made.

With Lanes & Planes, Covivio now does all this digitally, saving a lot of time and maintaining an overview.

The result: fully digitalised travel management

Travel management now works smoothly at Covivo, says Robin. 

Everything comes from just one tool, without a system break, and is therefore much faster and clearer. 

Robin is one of the frequent travellers in his company and told us what his personal experience with the tool is. Above all, the travel expense report and its organised overview helps him the most. He always knows which costs were incurred when and where and thus saves himself the additional credit card bill. Searching for invoices – that is no longer part of his everyday life. 

Robin also found the constant switching back and forth between several systems to book trips exhausting. Booking in this way costs companies an average of 1.5 to 2 hours per trip – a huge effort! 

With our Door-To-Door solution, Covivio has managed to reduce this to 15 minutes.

Covivio employees now all book their trips themselves and have predefined travel policies in the system, so there are no more annoying approval and confirmation processes.