Travel Management Company

Definition:

A Travel Management Company is an outsourced agency that helps businesses plan, arrange and organize their employee travel.

Traditional Role:

At their start, TMCs were mainly used to manage outsourced travel duties by businesses. They offered to help with reservations, assure compliance with the company travel policy, support travelers and gave statistics. During times when travel was mostly operated offline and companies didn’t own their booking tools, these services were very useful.

Limitations in Today’s Context:

• Slow Approval Process: Since bookings and approvals call for many emails and phone calls, the process is delayed and takes longer to confirm everything.
• Invisible Costs: Many TMCs often include extra charges, service fees or markups which are not easy for finance teams to spot.
• People in charge of travel sometimes miss the details, as there is little control over who tracks the data directly.
• Many TMCs are not flexible when it comes to integrating with modern HR, finance or ERP tools, so there is often a disjoint between workflows.

What motivates companies to divest from their own states.

As travel management gets more digital, companies are switching from TMCs to custom B2E platforms that help them manage travel budgets more efficiently, automatically process things and exercise complete control. By removing the middleman, these systems enable, fast appointments, straightforward application of policies and up-to-date information on spending and travelers’ locations.