A travel management company (TMC) is a company that arranges business travel for other companies. It negotiates rates with airlines and hotels, books and changes trips, and looks after travellers when plans go wrong. Large companies hand most of their travel to a TMC. Amex GBT is the largest in the world.
A TMC does four jobs. First, it negotiates. Because it books for many companies, it can agree lower fares and room rates than one company could get alone. Second, it books. Employees book routine trips themselves in corporate travel management software, and they call or message the TMC's agents for complex trips. Third, it helps when trips go wrong, with a support team that works day and night. Fourth, it reports. It tells each company what it spent and where its employees are.
The TMC's agents book through a global distribution system (GDS), which shows them fares from many airlines and lets them change tickets quickly. Many TMCs now also receive the airlines' own offers over NDC. Some run their services on a corporate travel platform instead of older systems.
Imagine a pharmaceutical company in Ahmedabad with 2,000 employees who travel for work. On a December morning, thick fog closes Delhi airport for four hours. Fourteen of the company's employees are booked on flights through Delhi that day. The TMC's system knows exactly who they are, because it holds every booking. Its agents rebook eleven of them on afternoon flights. They move the other three to the next morning and book hotel rooms near the airport. Each traveller receives a WhatsApp message with the new plan. The company's travel manager receives a list of all fourteen. A company's responsibility for its employees' safety during a trip is called duty of care.
A TMC earns in two ways. It charges the company a fee for each booking, or a fixed monthly fee for managing all its travel. It may also receive incentives from airlines and hotels for the volume of bookings it brings them.
Smaller companies often use a booking tool without a TMC. The tool handles routine trips well. The TMC is most useful when a trip involves many cities or many people, or when something goes wrong. Whichever way a trip is booked, the TMC applies each client's travel policy to it.