Taking off

Meteor Education had a TMC in place when Kelley joined the company, she said, but since has replaced it. “The original plan was to possibly do an RFP,” she said. “We were using virtual card payments for hotel, and I got wind that one of the TMCs had created their own virtual card programme. It was an agency I already had a pretty high opinion of, and so when we started looking at everything that they could offer, we said just go ahead and send us a proposal.”

After a review of the TMC’s service offerings and pricing structure, Meteor made the decision to switch. “I wasn’t sure that a full RFP was really kind of the way to go because we are so small,” said Kelley. “It was pretty straightforward.”

Snap also had a TMC when it began growing internationally, Parham said, but wrapping in each country – with different cultures, currencies and sometimes policies – into the travel programme proved challenging and left him with the impression that, for SMEs, perhaps there is a better way.

“I’ve been doing this a long time, and I’ve always thought that, hey, we should always try to consolidate. We should try to keep everything under one TMC and one online booking tool, and that’s the way it goes,” said Parham. “After what I went through at Snap, the one takeaway was that there doesn’t necessarily have to be one TMC. You can set up regionals. With today’s technology… the reporting capabilities are out there.”