Corporate travel management
Your travel budget isn't overspent. It's unmanaged.
Most companies we meet are not paying too much per ticket. They are losing money in six places nobody is watching, and the fare is only one of them. Corporate travel management is the work of closing the other five.
Where the money goes
Six leaks,
and only one
is the fare
Companies negotiate hard on ticket prices and lose more than the discount in the five places below. None of them show up as a line item, which is precisely why they persist.
| Ref | Leak | What happens | What closes it |
|---|---|---|---|
| L1 | Late booking | Trips approved three days out instead of fourteen. The single largest controllable cost in almost every travel programme, and it is a process problem, not a fare problem. | Advance-booking window in policy |
| L2 | Rate leakage | A negotiated hotel rate exists, and travellers book the same property elsewhere anyway because it was faster. The programme you paid to negotiate goes unused. | Rates loaded where people book |
| L3 | Unused tickets | Cancelled non-refundable tickets keep residual value for a limited window. Nobody tracks them, so they expire quietly and are re-bought at full price. | Residual value tracked per traveller |
| L4 | Missed GST input credit | Air, hotel and ground invoices raised without your GSTIN, or collected as handwritten slips. The credit is simply forfeited, and it never appears as a travel cost. | GSTIN on every booking at source |
| L5 | Out-of-policy spend | Discovered at reimbursement, when refusing it means a fight with someone who has already spent the money. By then the only options are bad ones. | Policy applied at request, not claim |
| L6 | Administrative time | The least visible cost. Hours from finance, admin and travellers spent chasing, forwarding, re-typing and reconciling. It never appears in the travel line at all. | One request, one system of record |
We publish no savings percentage here on purpose. Any figure quoted before seeing your data is a marketing number. Show us twelve months of invoices and we will tell you which of these six you actually have.
Why businesses choose us
Six reasons,
none of them
“passion”
Every travel company claims dedication and world-class service. Here are six things about working with us that a client could actually verify.
Escalation ends with a director
No regional head office to defer to and no ticket queue. When a decision needs making on a Sunday night, someone with the authority to make it is reachable — and if you are unhappy with the answer, you can go over their head to a name on the filing.
Our margin is on the quote
The service fee is stated as its own line. We are not funded by undisclosed supplier commission, which is the incentive that quietly makes an agency book the fare that pays best rather than the one that fits.
Built for companies without a travel department
Policy engines and duty-of-care tracking are normally priced for organisations with a dedicated travel manager. We run the same discipline for a forty-person firm, because that is who we built the business for.
A named consultant, not a pool
The same person handles your account month after month. They learn your policy, your cost centres and which of your travellers will not take a red-eye. You stop re-explaining your company every time you book.
We report our own failures
Missed SLAs and service failures appear in the quarterly review whether or not you noticed them. It is an uncomfortable document to produce and the fastest way to know your programme is honest.
One reconciled invoice, with your GSTIN
Air, hotel, ground and forex consolidated monthly with cost centre and project code against every line. Finance stops matching card statements to boarding passes, and the input credit stops being forfeited.
Our corporate travel solutions
Eight modules,
one account team
Take the whole programme or start with one module. Either way it is the same consultant, the same system of record and the same monthly invoice.
Air programme
Published, corporate negotiated, consolidator and SME fares checked against the same trip. Fare rules read before ticketing, unused tickets tracked and reapplied.
Hotel programme
Annual rate negotiation on your top cities, pushed for last-room availability rather than only a headline discount. City-tier caps, direct billing, GST invoicing.
Ground transport
Commercially registered vehicles and verified drivers for transfers, at-disposal days and employee rosters. Package limits stated upfront so the bill is predictable.
Visa & documentation
A case handler per file, document checks before submission, appointment tracking and attestation. Passport expiry monitored across your traveller base.
Forex & expense
Currency and cards arranged alongside the ticket, rate locked at the quote, TCS certificates issued and unused balances handled inside the statutory window.
MICE & events
Offsites, dealer meets and conferences — venue sourcing, room blocks, airport waves and on-ground coordination, contracted as one scope.
Duty of care
A live record of who is where, an emergency number that answers, and a documented response when a city becomes a problem overnight.
Reporting & review
Spend by route, city, carrier and traveller. Lead times, policy compliance, rate leakage, recovered ticket value — and our own misses.
The whole trip
Corporate travel
management,
simplified.
One programme across the four stages of every business trip — set up before, booked in one place, supported on the road, and measured afterwards.
Pre-trip
- Travel policy
- Traveller profiles
- Approval workflow
- Budget control
- Preferred suppliers
- Visa
- Insurance
- Risk assessment
Booking
- Flights
- Hotels
- Rail
- Transfers
- Car rental
- Group travel
- MICE & events
During trip
- 24×7 support
- Emergency assistance
- Disruption management
- Rebooking
- Traveller tracking
- Duty of care
Post-trip
- Management information (MIS)
- Expense reports
- Savings analysis
- Supplier analysis
- Traveller analytics
- Carbon reporting
Corporate dashboard
One view of
your programme
The modules below are how we run and report your account today, delivered with your named account team. A self-serve online dashboard giving you direct access to these same views is in active development — we would rather describe what exists than promise a screen we have not shipped.
Booking
Every trip raised through one desk and recorded against your company, cost centre and project code.
Approval
Requests routed to the right approver against your policy, with out-of-policy items flagged before they are booked.
Traveller profiles
Passport, visa validity, preferences and entitlements held per traveller, so nobody re-keys them every trip.
Policy
Your written travel policy applied at the point of request — caps, cabin class and advance-booking rules built in.
Reports
Spend by route, city, carrier and traveller, with lead times and policy compliance for each period.
Invoices
One consolidated, GST-compliant invoice with your GSTIN on every line, ready for your finance system.
MIS
The management information behind your quarterly review — savings, leakage, recovered ticket value and our own SLAs.
Find yourself on this list
Five stages.
Most are on
the third.
Nobody arrives at a managed travel programme in one move. Knowing which rung you are on tells you what the next one costs and what it returns.
Everyone books their own
Travellers buy tickets on personal cards and claim later. Nobody knows annual spend until year end, and duty of care is a phone tree. Common up to about thirty people, and fine until the first emergency.
Most start hereOne person books everything
An office administrator becomes the de facto travel desk on top of their real job. It works, until they take leave, and all the supplier knowledge lives in one inbox.
A single point of failureAn agency, but no policy
Bookings go to an agent, so the admin burden drops. Spend still is not governed — every request is approved individually, on judgement, by whoever is asked.
Where most SMEs sitPolicy and approvals
Entitlements by grade, advance-booking rules, city-wise caps, and out-of-policy requests routed automatically. Arguments stop being personal because the rule is written down.
The step that pays for itselfA managed programme
Negotiated rates on your top routes, unused tickets recovered, quarterly reviews against your own data, and a duty-of-care record you can act on in minutes.
Where we take youThe agentic era of corporate travel
Software that
acts, inside
limits you set
Travel is one of the few corporate functions where autonomous software genuinely helps, because most of the work is watching things change and reacting quickly. It is also a function where an unsupervised agent can spend your money badly at three in the morning. So we are specific about the line.
What we let agents run
Continuous, tireless, fully logged- Watch booked fares and flag when a cheaper permitted routing appears
- Monitor schedule changes and cancellations across every live PNR
- Pre-check a request against policy and attach the compliant alternative
- Route approvals to the right person and chase them when they stall
- Track unused ticket value, visa expiry and passport validity by traveller
- Reconcile bookings to GST invoices and flag mismatches before month end
- Draft the itinerary, the checklist and the routine traveller replies
Where a human takes over
Judgement, spend authority, accountability- Any spend above your stated threshold, always confirmed by a person
- Rebuilding a broken trip mid-journey, where the right answer is contextual
- Visa strategy, because embassy discretion is not a rules engine
- Negotiation with a supplier, which is a relationship and not a query
- Telling you the cheaper option is the wrong one, and taking the argument
- Owning the mistake when the system gets it wrong
Agents propose, people approve
No autonomous purchase above the limit you set. The agent assembles the options and the reasoning; the decision and the liability stay with a named human.
Every action is logged
What was suggested, what was accepted, by whom and when. If you cannot audit an automated decision afterwards, it should not have been automated.
Your data is not the product
Traveller data is used to run your programme and nothing else. It is not sold, not brokered, and not fed to anyone who wants to market to your staff.
A person is always reachable
Automation reduces the queue. It never becomes the only thing on the other end of the line at 3am, which is the moment automation is least useful.
The document itself
Eight clauses.
Not forty pages.
A travel policy nobody reads governs nothing. Yours should fit on a few pages and settle these eight questions, so that no trip needs a fresh negotiation.
Advance-booking window
How many days ahead domestic and international trips must be raised, and who may waive it. The highest-value clause in the document.
Cabin class by grade & duration
Economy below a stated flight time, premium above it, by seniority. Written once so it is never negotiated per trip.
Hotel caps by city tier
Per-night ceilings that reflect what each city costs. One national figure overpays in Indore and strands people in Mumbai.
Ground transport rules
When a company car is warranted, when an app cab is fine, and which vehicle class by trip type. Include the commercial-registration requirement.
Per diem or actuals
Pick one and apply it consistently. Per diem removes receipt collection entirely; actuals need a documented limit per meal.
Approval matrix
Who approves what, at which value, and who acts when they are unreachable. Most policies fail here rather than on the caps.
Exceptions process
A written route for the genuine exception, so that breaking policy is a decision on record rather than a habit.
Duty of care
What the company owes a traveller in an emergency, who is called, and how quickly you can establish where everyone is.
How onboarding works
Live in four
weeks, without
a bad fortnight
Most travel programmes fail in the switch, not the design. We run the old process and the new one side by side until nobody is relying on us by accident.
Look at what you already spend
Twelve months of travel invoices and expense claims, sorted by route, city, traveller and booking lead time. Almost every company is surprised by at least one number in this.
Draft the policy
We bring a draft based on your actual spend, not a template. You argue with it, we amend it, and your directors sign a document of a few pages rather than forty.
Load the setup
Traveller profiles, GSTIN, cost centres, approvers and entitlements configured. Negotiated rates loaded where people book, so the programme is used by default.
Go live, quietly
A thirty-minute walkthrough for whoever raises requests, and a named account manager. First bookings run alongside the old process for a fortnight, not instead of it.
What we need from you
Six things, once
- Twelve months of travel invoices or expense claims, in whatever format you have
- Your GSTIN, registered address and billing entity details
- A traveller list with grades, cost centres and any standing preferences
- The names of your approvers, and who acts when they are unreachable
- Existing airline or hotel agreements, if you already hold any
- One person on your side who can sign off the policy
Every quarter
Six things in
your review
Read the last one first. An account you have to audit is an account we have already lost.
- Spend by route, city, carrier and traveller, against the same quarter last year
- Booking lead times, and what late bookings cost you specifically
- Policy compliance, with the exceptions listed and who approved each
- Unused ticket value recovered, and what remains recoverable
- Rate leakage — where your negotiated rates were available but not used
- Our own service failures and missed SLAs, whether or not you raised them
How we get paid
Stated on
the quote
You are entitled to know how your travel manager earns, because it tells you whose interest the recommendation serves.
Transaction fee
A stated fee per booking, shown on the quote. Predictable, and it scales with activity rather than with the value of the ticket.
Management fee
A monthly retainer for larger programmes covering account management, reporting and negotiation. Suits companies with steady volume.
What we don't do
We do not fund ourselves on undisclosed supplier commission. An agency paid by the supplier has an incentive that points away from you, however good its intentions.
Frequently asked questions
The ones we
get asked most
How small is too small for a managed programme?
Do we have to change how our team books?
What does it actually cost?
How long does onboarding take?
Do you replace our expense or accounting system?
What happens at two in the morning?
Can you work with airline deals we already hold?
Who can see our travel data?
What if we want to leave?
Honestly
When not
to hire us
- Companies whose travel is genuinely three flights a year — book those yourself
- Anyone wanting the cheapest fare regardless of what it does to the trip
- Programmes where policy exists to be overridden by whoever shouts loudest
- Buyers who want a rate card but no reporting, no policy and no review
Start here
Send twelve months of travel invoices.
We will come back with which of the six leaks you have and what closing them is worth. No charge, and no obligation to appoint us.