Travel Management Blog

While mobile itinerary management may be the future for business travel, electronic travel documents are still the firm favourite today.

Although these important documents are an after-thought to some, they are critical part of the travel experience for business travellers. Effective travel documents are a big plus for travel buyers too, reducing the number of complaints they receive from travellers when things go wrong.

Booking EAN hotels means guaranteed commissions for your TMC, but brings with it new IT and administration challenges.

The Expedia Affiliate Network (EAN) inventory of hotels offers TMCs and travellers an attractive additional source of accommodation choices to those already available through the GDS’.

As the Business Travel Show’s annual survey of travel buyers proves, TMCs are under continued pressure to evolve their role in travel purchasing. So how can integration of your TMC’s software systems help you meet and exceed your customers’ expectations?

While overall travel budgets are on the rise, each trip continues to attract intense scrutiny for its compliance with policy, cost and value for money. More and more policies call for business to include low cost airlines in their travel plans as well as alternative methods of finding affordable accommodation.

The accumulation of manual processes is inevitable in business travel management as you strive to integrate customer specific policies, route deals and other oddities into the unflinching GDS workflow.

To begin with, manual processes may be few and may seem manageable – a small price to pay for retaining a happy customer. But, as time goes on and the number of manual processes grows, their impact becomes more negative. Suddenly, each booking calls for the consultant to search their memories or the company’s files looking for every relevant customer policy, route deal, traveller preference, reporting peculiarity, cost centre, etc, etc, etc. The draw down on resources and the potential for error becomes great.

Differentiate your Travel Management Company from the rest with these five simple strategies.

In today’s increasingly competitive corporate travel market, differentiating your TMC from its competitors is essential for survival and growth. With new threats appearing all the time, ranging from new OTA entrants to hotels trying to do more direct business, now more than ever you need to offer consistently high customer satisfaction and give them good reason to stick with you rather than defecting to another, perhaps cheaper, opponent.