Whilst travel is an interesting topic for many people, allowing travellers to book travel independently brings to light many hidden costs. From the more obvious costs of time and money, to the less obvious issues of expense management and not knowing where employees are if there is an emergency, there are many areas where a TMC can help you save money and streamline the travel buying process.

• Traveller’s time spent searching for the best flight and hotels options from various sources
  Whether you are a Senior Manager at an NGO or an academic at a major University, an hour spent browsing the internet has a significant indirect cost, in terms of the work not being done. Further, travel is inevitably a topic of interest for everyone and what was intended to be a ‘quick look-up of a fare’ too often turns out to be an exploration of the possible.

• The cost and time involved in changes and amendments
  Inevitably there are times when you need to cancel or change a ticket. In a recent study for a major NGO, 102% of bookings were changed or amended. Booking with online travel shops and directly with airlines often means you get inflexible tickets, meaning you may end up needing to buy a new ticket or paying high administration charges. Key Travel has specialist fares which increase the flexibility for travellers and reduce administration charges.

• Higher fares
  A trained travel consultant can call upon a range of specially negotiated contracts, their experience and systems to find more cost effective fares, especially to less travelled destinations. 

• Last minute premiums
  TMCs enable you to hold a ticket, meaning you can book earlier, securing a lower price. If you are unable to hold a ticket with an online shop, you can end up paying a higher fare whilst waiting for a trip/meeting to be confirmed.

• Expense management
  Booking with a TMC on account reduces the time and cost of expense management

• Policy compliance (or the lack of)
  Consciously or otherwise, travellers can inadvertently book tickets that do not adhere to their travel policy, designed to control cost (e.g. you can only fly economy for short haul flights). In a recent Key Travel survey, 28% of travellers did not realise their organisation had a travel policy and, of those who knew there was a policy, 13% did not understand it, or how it applies to them. A TMC enables an organisation to enforce policy, ensuring that the right form or class of transport is taken, both to protect the budget and to ensure the traveller’s welfare.

• Budget control – if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it
  Travel is typically the largest operating cost to a business after payroll and will be a seven figure sum for major NGOs and universities. Travel booked outside of a TMC is hard to track and therefore hard to understand and effect. A TMC provides an organisation with consolidated management information, enabling budget managers to understand where the money is going, giving them a chance of saving money when times are hard.

• Costly mistakes
  Everyone makes mistakes, but it can be expensive if it is your staff who make the mistake that requires new tickets or results in additional fees. Using a TMC provides a level of quality assurance to bookings, reducing costly errors and placing the onus on the TMC to get things right, every time. 

• Using multiple sources
  When you need multiple services (flight, car hire, hotel, visa, rail…) searching for each individually increases the time spent ‘shopping’, as well as potential cost errors and support issues. Buying all the required services from a single source enables travel procurement to be more streamlined.

• Duty of care
  Perhaps the single most important hidden cost of not using a TMC is that of traveller welfare. If your travelling employees have booked privately, rather than through a managed procurement process, then you cannot demonstrate that the traveller was given the correct advice when travelling and, when things go wrong like recently in Mumbai, you are not able to locate or support travellers who may be in those regions. A TMC can provide risk management services that provide pre-trip advice and traveller tracking tools to ensure you fulfil both your legal and moral obligations to travellers working on your behalf.

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