Fri, Jul 12, 2013 Enjoy the Meals You Love While Stretching Your Per Diem

After a long day of meetings, you head back to your hotel room, kick back, and start thinking about dinner. You could go to one of the restaurants nearby, but you already have your shoes off, and eating alone in public can feel awkward. There’s always room service, but the menu doesn’t look appealing and the high prices would be a stretch for your per diem. Fortunately, a wide variety of delicious cuisine is also available via your smartphone.

An article in The New York Times explains that many business travelers are passing up room service in favor of food-delivery companies like Seamless, GrubHub and Delivery.com, which offer a wider selection, tastier options and quick delivery at a lower cost than room service.

These services connect hotel guests to outside restaurants through a website or mobile app, and some offer reporting features designed to simplify travel expense management. Younger travelers increasingly prefer to use a delivery service. They like the convenience of ordering from a mobile app and the low cost of delivery compared to room service.

When combined with a mobile expense management app, you can order a meal and track where your per diem is in real time. Chrome River MOBILE for iPhone and iPad makes it easy to stay current with expenses while on the road, instead of trying to remember your expenses and locate crumpled receipts when you get back to the office. Tracking expenses as you go is easy thanks to the user-friendly dashboard, and it helps your company reimburse you in a timely fashion.

When the delivery service arrives with your meal order, just use your mobile device to enter the expense and snap a photo of the receipt. When you’re ready, touch “Send Expenses” to save the expense to your Chrome River EXPENSE dashboard. It will be there the next time you log in, ready to drag and drop into an expense report.

We’d like to hear your feedback. Which do you prefer when you’re traveling – food delivery or room service? Share your thoughts in the comments section below!