You Don’t Have to Fly Solo

Partnering with TMCs is a key component to rebuilding corporate travel.

With changing regulations, compounding compliance concerns, increasing traveler demands, and a jittery C-Suite eager to get people back on the road, it might seem like the future of your business travel program rests squarely on your shoulders and your shoulders alone.

But unless you’re actively avoiding your TMC partners for some reason, you don’t have to reconfigure corporate travel all by yourself.

Now, in our post-pandemic business world, where the return to travel is in a brighter spotlight than you’ve ever known, and where CFOs and road-warriors alike are watching your every move, travel management companies are collaborating with travel managers in new and impactful ways.

According to a recent eBook aptly titled Corporate Travel is All Over the Map, TMCs are offering:

• Clear insight into what’s actually happening at ticket counters, car-rental companies, and in hotel lobbies as people brave the new unknowns of business travel after COVID-19.
• Guidance on how to get your internal teams aligned behind you to ensure you have everything it takes to reactivate your travel program.
• Ramped-up automation to spur greater efficiencies, while at the same time making sure there’s always someone on the line should travelers find themselves in trouble.

TMCs are also able to offer an insider’s view into the new world of travel – how remote work impacts trips to far-flung destinations, for example, and how travelers and their organizations can handle reducing overnights, combining meetings, selecting direct flights, and otherwise shifting where, when, and how they go places.

The eBook also highlights the increasing importance of unused tickets. While it’s always been important to stay on top of canceled trips and the credits you’re due, no one has ever seen this kind of volume before. And your TMC can help you make sure you take full advantage of the investments you’ve already made and avoid leaving any tickets on the table.

The bottom line is: Your TMC can help you out, so you don’t have to do it all. And by “all,” we mean more than you’ve ever had to do before. Travel isn’t what it was two years ago, and it never will be again. You, as a travel manager, are helping shape the “new normal” of corporate travel, and leaning on your TMCs will inform your decisions, shore up your ideas with best practices, and keep the process from getting out of hand.

That is not to say, however, that your partnership with a travel management company is the singular answer to building the momentum business leaders expect and offering the flexibility travelers demand. You’ll also want the right tech partner to manage the details behind your new program and policies – someone who can make safe, sustainable, secure travel attainable, no matter where your business is headed. You’ll find more about that in the eBook, as well.

In the end (or rather, the beginning, because this is new to all of us), travel is always better with someone in the passenger seat. And TMCs are in for the long haul.