Corporate travel glossary
Travel management company (TMC)
Also called: TMC · corporate travel agency · business travel agency
A travel management company is the agency a corporate appoints to book and service its business travel. It holds or accesses the airline and hotel contracts, issues tickets, handles changes, cancellations and disruption, and reports on spend. A TMC is a service provider — the booking tool its travellers use may be its own or someone else’s.
In practice
- Appointed by tender, usually on a transaction fee per ticket or a management fee
- Holds or accesses negotiated airline and hotel rates on the corporate’s behalf
- Runs an offline desk for complex itineraries, group travel and disruption
- Supplies the data feed that spend reporting and reconciliation are built on
- May supply the booking tool, or plug into one the corporate already licenses
Why it matters
Treating the agency and the booking platform as one thing is the commonest way a travel tender goes wrong. They are separable: a company can change booking software without retendering the agency, and change agency without changing software — but only if the contract was written to allow it.