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ranslation and interpretation, air delay compensation, concierge services – TMCs are no longer just issuing tickets and booking hotel rooms. And this is not a new phenomenon. Turn back the clock 15 years, when airlines started to remove commission payments to TMCs. This was dressed up in a new moral code: ‘We are not your customers, so it is not appropriate that we pay you; this divides your loyalties and you need to add value to your relationship with customers.’ And TMCs grasped the nettle and did just that. “As an industry, we have been spectacularly successful at developing support and services as part of the professional relationship,” says Traveleads Managing Director – Corporate Division, Gary McLeod. “There is a lot more to the relationship than selling tickets.” At first, this diversification was largely travel related – meetings and events, expense management, booking tools. This has grown to embrace traveller tracking, MI, duty of care, risk assessment, security services and most recently, the demands of GDPR. Now, however, to continue to be relevant and to differentiate themselves, TMCs are taking a wider view and, as a result, Traveleads is branching out into a ‘dial a translator’ interpretation service through client TheBigWord. “With Brexit, there has to be a bigger focus on the wider world,” says McLeod. Customers buy a one-off licence (£100) and then purchase minutes in two-hour batches. Travellers get a credit card with a company-specific access code to the service, which is billed to the corporate account through Traveleads. The TMC has also supplied furniture, including orthopaedic chairs to travellers with a back problem, and extra-long beds in hotels for especially tall travellers. “If it is legal, honest and decent, we will try to do it for clients,” says McLeod. “I don’t think we have ever said an outright 'no'.” Unclaimed air delay compensation turned out to be costing CTI’s clients half a million pounds so the TMC now handles this for them. In addition, “We partner with Maiden Voyage, who give our clients lone female traveller training,” says Commercial Director
Melanie Quinn. CTI also provides Trace Me tags, which guarantee return of lost luggage from anywhere worldwide or travellers receive $500 compensation. Some of CWT’s more arcane requests have emerged through the Meetings and Events division, including a client who required a circus act at a conference and a media company that needed to transport props such as fake swords. Individuals from security companies who travel with a firearm up the ante: “They don’t just check it in,” says Senior Director Sales, UK & Ireland Jo Dobson in a masterful understatement. “It requires a lot of liaison with the airline and airport.”
If it is legal, honest and decent, we will try to do it for clients. I don’t think we have ever said an outright 'no'” She sees the increasing requirement for data as an opportunity for CWT to provide services to ensure the wellbeing of travellers such as working with a client’s HR team to map the number of sick days someone has taken, to see whether a road warrior needs time off; or weighing the cost of travel against business won, which would preclude unnecessary curtailing of travel spend. “That would come from our consultancy team and will develop our non-travel services. To have longevity as a TMC, we have to deliver these services to clients”, says Dobson. Some of FCM Travel Solutions’ left-field operations came out of setting up a visa service, which Iain Collinson was tasked with. “We were focused on providing the best in the market – flights, hotels – but we needed to create an end-to-end customer experience. The premise behind FCM Travel Essentials was agility,” he says. Visa handling led to providing customers with immigration services, including for one client that retains an immigration professional but prefers the matter to be handled alongside FCM’s visa provision.
Taxation followed. A recruitment company was moving a Swedish national from his permanent residence in Bangkok to South Africa on a two-year contract. “Our client wanted to know what the tax implications were, so we brought in a specialist to assist with that,” says Collinson. FCM has travel clinics in some of its high street Flight Centre shops. Although these are largely catering to leisure travellers, they are also close to business areas such as London’s Monument and therefore convenient for corporate clients. The TMC is now looking at bringing vaccination services to VIP clients’ work premises. After a spate of terrorist attacks in Egypt, FCM has also set up a secure fast-track service for a customer’s VIP travellers, avoiding public areas. “It is about meeting client demand,” says Collinson. “That does not mean we have to do everything possible, we just need to involve the customer in innovation so that we can identify whether there is a need to scale it up or just provide a one-off service.” The last word goes to director of The Corporate Travel Partnership, Robert Daykin: “TMCs that think laterally and see what services customers are using through third parties that they could bring in-house, will become a better one-stop shop,” he says.
THEBUSINESSTRAVELMAG.com
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2/13/18 03:04 PM