Travel Salary Sacrifice: help your employees recharge for less

However your employees like to unwind – Travel Salary Sacrifice is just the ticket

Imagine you’ve just bought a new phone, but you can only afford to charge it for an hour a day.

You start off with 100% battery. You make a couple of calls, you message a few friends, you watch a few reels. By the time you go to bed, you’re at 20%. An hour’s charge gets you back to 95%. Nearly full, but not quite.

You end the next day at 15%. The day after, 10%. And so on.

By the end of the week, you’re out of juice before you’ve even had dinner.

That’s what it’s like when your employees can’t afford to relax properly during their time off. Their batteries never fully recharge.

According to People Management, 81% of employees notice feelings of burnout, exhaustion or poor mental health if they haven’t taken a day off in several months.

And your company pays the price in sick days, lost productivity and turnover.

Travel Salary Sacrifice makes going on holiday cheaper and easier for every employee

Travel doesn’t come cheap. The average UK household spends 10% of their income on holidays.

For many employees, that means compromising on decisions like where they go, when they travel and how long they stay. For some, it means using expensive credit, which they carry with them for months or years after they get home. Hardly relaxing.

But there’s a better way. Travel Salary Sacrifice is an easy to implement workplace benefit that helps your staff get more for their money when they go on holiday.

• Members only pricing – low rates on flights, hotels, package holidays and more
• National Insurance savings – employees save up to 8% on every booking
• Spread the cost – pay over 12 months, interest free – no more credit cards

From deck chairs, to cable cars – holiday savings for all your employees

Everyone relaxes differently. A two week package holiday in the Maldives, a hiking trip in the Andes...

Travel Salary Sacrifice saves your employees money on holidays of all shapes and sizes.

• Hotels
• Flights
• Package holidays
• Cruises
• City breaks
• Skiing trips
• Safaris
• Airport parking and lounges
• And much more

How does Travel Salary Sacrifice work?

Like all salary sacrifice schemes, Travel Salary Sacrifice works by reducing the amount of National Insurance your employees pay each month.

Your employees agree to “swap” some of their pay for a holiday budget. That money gets taken before tax and National Insurance is calculated – so they don’t pay any NI on the amount they sacrifice. For basic rate taxpayers, that means an instant 8% saving on every single holiday.

Even better, Travel Salary Sacrifice is an incredibly straightforward benefit to set up and administer for HR.

Here’s how it works in practice:

• Your employees opt-in and request an annual holiday budget
  • They don’t need to spend their budget in one go – they can split it across multiple holidays
  • Budgets are valid for 18 months – so your employees can stack them for bigger, more expensive trips
• You review and approve/decline all budget requests
• Employees book holidays from your exclusive members-only website, or over the phone
• Employees pay for their budget in 12 equal, interest-free instalments – taken directly from their salary
• Your organisation is invoiced when budgets are approved – funds are kept in a protected trust account until they’re used

The business case for Travel Salary Sacrifice

The average employee leaves 5 days of annual leave on the table every year. The main reason? For many, going on holiday is too expensive.

It might seem counterintuitive, but helping your employees make the most of their time away from work can dramatically improve outcomes when they’re back on the job.

• Improve productivity – using annual leave improves employee performance by up to 40%.

• Reduce absenteeism – taking holiday reduces the risk of sick leave by 28%.

• Attract the best talent – employees who believe their employer cares about their wellbeing are 5x more likely to recommend their company as a good place to work.

• Retain more staff – every 40 hours annual leave taken extends employee tenure by 8 months.

The takeaway? Helping your employees get away means they come back fully recharged, ready to do their best work.

It’s not rocket science. We all know the value of good rest. It’s the equivalent of plugging your phone in overnight, so it’s ready to go the full day when you wake up, instead of fizzling out around lunchtime.