Travel Guide: Toronto Business Trip
Toronto is one of Canada’s largest cities, home to the country’s major finances, a great future and a strong cultural grounding. Here you will get everything, many parks, museums, places for entertainment, a successful career and even a second half. But today we are going to talk specifically about successful career and business, more specifically business travelling.
This article will try to help those who are busy planning a business trip. We will talk about how to plan the trip most effectively, where to save money and in principle how to spend as little money as possible and still get the most favourable result in such conditions.
Transport hire
This is an incredibly important point, because there are often situations where you are flying to another city (in our case Toronto) and you need to have a clearly planned time, for example, right after your arrival you need to be at a meeting in 40 minutes (roughly). In such cases, a regular taxi can be a bit of a letdown (because they have no guarantee of time), it is possible that you will wait 30 minutes for a car and thus there is a great risk of being late.
To avoid this situation, we advise you to plan everything in advance in your country and order Toronto airport taxi there, firstly, you get a fixed price (it means that you know exactly how much money you will pay for your route – it is very convenient for budget control), secondly, you get a real guarantee of time (you will be picked up at exactly the specified time and you will 100% be on time for your meeting) + Atob Transfer has nice prices especially for companies that travel on business and a much larger selection of cars.
Keep an expense report
This is a pretty trivial tip on the face of it, but very few people follow it. Simply create an online spreadsheet that lists all the names of employees who are travelling to Toronto, then sign the cells with the main categories that the money will be spent on (e.g. accommodation, food, etc.). And as each employee spends money – the table will fill up.
This is a very effective method of tracking your budget, you will be able to see in real time where the money goes and react quickly + it will be honest.
Be strategic
It is extremely rare for a business trip to go off without the slightest problem, and unfortunately there are situations where things can go very drastically wrong. It is important to realise two things, that this is normal and that it is important to be able to react quickly to the problem and get out of it. Think about what risks may arise specifically on your trip, it may even make sense to make a risk tree (if it is a very large business trip).
Visualise how you would deal with a possible problem, from the minor to the more serious. Then, mark the solution and a backup plan “B” either in your head or document it and keep it until the trip is over.
A new type of business travel
Bleisure travel is a relatively recent development in the business world (about 30 years ago), but it has proved so effective that statistics show that employees are willing to accept lower salaries, provided that the job includes bleisure travel.
So, what is it? This type of travel implies that apart from the business matters for which you went on a work trip, you will be expected to take a mini-vacation. This can manifest itself in different ways depending on the specific company and its conditions. For example, in the case of Canada, you may as a manager allow your employee to spend a weekend in Toronto (purely for relaxation) or you may allow them to take their family on a trip and give them some days off (with payment for all of this).
Not every manager will agree to organise this type of trip, but believe me, if you do it really well, as statistics show – the efficiency of work will increase many times over.
Renting accommodation
If you don’t really like the previous option and you are in favour of travelling specifically on a work trip and saving money in the process. Then we advise you not to rent hotels, especially in the city centre (as is often the case).
Try to consider a guest house as an alternative, it is essentially the same facilities as a hotel (but you will have to cook your own food) and the area itself (as is often the case) will be quite quiet, unlike the centre. Also there is an option called co-working hotel, it is even more favourable option (often it is even cheaper than a guest house), there you get a special workspace (as if some kind of mini office) + quite comfortable living conditions. In Toronto we advise you to consider such options: WeWork Office Space & Coworking, EAST ROOM, Project Spaces Camden Street.