What does a corporate travel agent do?
- Arranging travel visas
- Making flight bookings and other transport bookings, such as car rentals
- Ensuring duty of care responsibilities are met
- Creating travel itineraries
- Making hotel bookings
- Working finance departments to align on travel expense processes
- Providing assistance for business travelers
What are the advantages of using a corporate travel agent?
- Corporate travel agents understand travel costs: Their job is to ensure that your travel budgets are respected, by making sure they obtain the best deals possible on transportation, accommodation, etc. They have established relationships with suppliers to get better deals and discounts.
- They manage complex expense processes: Handing over travel expense duties to corporate travel agents relieves businesses of time spent poring over paperwork and reimbursement submissions.
- All of your business travel needs are accounted for: Corporate travel agents are trained in understanding each business and each traveler’s specific needs and adapting business travel for them.
- Provides traveler support: Employees can contact the corporate travel agent directly when they run into issues during business trips. Agents can easily rearrange transportation, advise on safety measures specific to each country, and facilitate changes to itineraries.
What are the disadvantages of using a corporate travel agent?
- Businesses can rack up costs when using corporate travel agents: each corporate travel agent or agency is different, but most charge businesses an annual fee, plus transactional fees every time you use their service. This alone can eat up a large chunk of businesses’ travel budgets.
- They’re working for them, not for you: since they have established relationships with suppliers, you can’t always be sure that the deal they’ve obtained is the best one for you, or the best one for them.
- Less transparency into travel processes: whenever you outsource a business process, you automatically have less insight into how and why decisions are made. This gives you less opportunity to keep an eye on your travel management KPIs.
- They may not be available when you need them: generally speaking, corporate travel agents only work during standard business hours. If your employees face issues after working hours or during the weekends, they’ll be left unable to contact someone for assistance.
Should you use a travel management platform to manage your business travel?
- Searching, booking, and managing flight expenses all from within the TravelPerk platform. Plus, you’ll have access to an extensive inventory for booking corporate flights to help you find competitive rates.
- Booking accommodation from within one platform, by giving you access to an industry-leading inventory for booking corporate accommodation, such as hotel rooms.
- Defining and automating your travel policy guidelines and approval workflow for better compliance.
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