The global travel industry spends trillions of dollars each year. Moreover, despite the ongoing crisis, business travel is still returning and becoming more powerful. Above all, most businesses are looking for a travel management company (TMC) to help prepare and increase returns.
A travel management company includes a travel agent or agency that fulfills corporate travel needs. Furthermore, as technology evolves, more personalization options and booking trips have never been more accessible.
Moreover, there are countless benefits to using a TMC, but in this article, we will identify the top articles for using a TMC.
9 Benefits of using a TMC in your business
1. Dedicated support team
A TMC should offer its clients a dedicated support team. As a travel manager, you should be responsible for creating and evolving a complex program. Working with a dedicated support team should help you manage your program.
Initially, you can try getting help from experts. Moreover, even if you are seeking to make new adjustments to your travel program or looking to improve it, a TMC should make recommendations to help you meet your goal.
Overall, it doesn’t matter how many years of experience a TMC has, but rather how much value they provide for you. Thus, travel managers can rely entirely on experts to provide them with some of the best practices and experiences. In addition, primarily operating in a dynamic environment, travel managers need to be informed about all emerging trends in the industry continuously.
Depending on your needs, your team might have access to a certified support team, an advisor team, or both. By partnering with a travel management company, your travelers can feel more confident than ever and are trusted by experts 24/7, 365 days per year.
Moreover, having a dedicated support team is part of your travel challenges and essential for improving the overall travel experience. A TMC also considers travelers’ preferences and loyalty information whenever they help them with their book travel policy.
2. Efficiency and agility
A TMC can make your travel booking process much easier for your travelers. Not only in the aspect of booking and organizing your travel, but the travel program itself, such as reporting and managing VAT, invoices, your team, and more.
Nevertheless, everything becomes much easier whenever you try to do them within one platform because it was built for that exact purpose.
3. Cheaper hotel bookings and flights
A TMC company won’t let you off for free, and many may complain about this. However, there are many benefits to this. Even though a company will charge you for a monthly or yearly subscription, the reality is that you can still save a significant amount of money. Above all, this is true if you travel regularly or have employees.
TMCs have partnerships with each other and many business connections across travel industries, giving them a significant advantage in flight bookings and hotels. Moreover, they have the expertise to allow cheap flights at the right time and place.
As a result, travel costs will be much cheaper since you have many more affordable flights and the right area for bookings at the right time. As a result, travel costs are reduced, which is in your favor.
For example, TravelPerk is a company that has plenty of partnerships and allows companies to effectively book flights and have many more alternatives when booking hotels to stay at.
4. Travel policy support
Moreover, some of the best parts of what a TMC can offer you is a travel policy that keeps business travel consistent and ensures traveling employees are happy and safe. A clear travel policy is about creating regulations and rules based on expenses on appropriate and inappropriate behaviors.
Aside from that, a TMC is important in assisting you with travel options that meet the criteria mentioned in travel policies.
5. Cost saving methods
Corporate travel management companies are excellent for one thing: to help businesses save a significant amount of money by securing low rates on travel. For instance, you can imagine that a regular hotel will cost $150 per night for your entire team, but if you have a partnership through your TMC, you might receive a percentage off. But, of course, the amount discounted will depend on how much the partner offers.
With the help of the TMC, your buying power will increase to help you save money, and it can continuously negotiate lowering rates over time if you are a regular traveler.
TMC makes compliance so effortless through the integration of technology. It not only helps you complete payments but also allows you to negotiate rates. Moreover, we can consider airline tickets that might go unused. Especially during COVID-19, it’s not surprising that business travelers cancel trips.
A portion of tickets go unused, and the most crucial part is that a TMC will closely monitor these funds and not waste any of your time, but ensure that your tickets are used before they expire.
The real question, though, is how this benefits the traveler?
By negotiating lower rates, travelers will often be able to choose higher-end hotels more often than they are offered without having to purchase TMC. Overall, this improves the travel experience for travelers.
By providing travelers with necessary money-saving tools, they can quickly cash in on those tickets when booking online.
6. 24/7 support
Before discussing this benefit, we must clarify that top TMCs receive 24/7 support. Remember that not all offer it, but the most quality ones do. Being shipped between call centers can be a frustrating experience, and something you don’t want to occur is being stuck at airports with flight cancellations.
TMCs can help provide quick emergency assistance that is at your service 24/7. Therefore, you are saving to get help anytime and any day of the week.
7. Reporting and travel alerts
When it comes to submitting travel expenditures, most travel companies will gather information into one report and bring some of the most important ones together. Moreover, this makes it easier to keep track of your expenses and identify where you are spending more and where you aren’t.
Overall, TMC experts will go the extra mile to help you analyze important information in your reports to make significant adjustments to your strategies.
8. Peace of mind
A benefit we can’t forget to mention within this article is a piece of mind. It’s challenging to manage everything on your own, so your best bet is to make travel management easy. After all, booking tickets is complicated and challenging to handle independently. Therefore, TMCs are an excellent way to give you peace and not worry about what can go wrong.
You just cannot manage everything on your own, no matter how experienced you are.
9. Saves travelers time
Integrated travel programs are essential for saving travel managers time by keeping them efficient and organized. Whether you’re managing an extensive global travel program, working with a TMC can make your day easier by implementing plans to help you reach your goals and support travelers.
How do travelers save time? Well, integrated programs will simplify the booking process and make it easier for the trip to get approved, providing the right amount of resources and services needed to make trips an absolute blast.
The days where inbox searches for a flight are gone, not knowing if the bookings are complying with your policy or not. Travelers need to spend their time traveling and what they were hired to do rather than having to waste useless time comparing travel costs, finding free bookings, and figuring out the logistics of a trip. The travel management company does all the work for you in this case.
Time is one of our most important assets; if we waste it trying to figure out things, we won’t be efficient in using most of it. Nevertheless, when time is wasted, it’ll directly come to unnecessary expenses too!
Wrapping everything up
That’s about it for this article. These are our top nine benefits for hiring a travel management company. Few people know the benefits of a TMC, but when you start using it, you’ll see how much it affects your daily performance in the travel industry.
Traveling requires time, something travelers desperately need, so it’s your time to step up and hire the right people to help you save as much time as you can. Moreover, if you fail to save time, you’ll struggle to promote productivity and efficiency in your travel company.
