While essential for business growth, as a travel manager, you’re too familiar with the challenges it brings. Managing fluctuating airline prices, negotiating favorable hotel rates, ensuring seamless booking processes, and controlling costs while prioritizing employee comfort can quickly become overwhelming. These complexities drain time and resources and make it harder for you to focus on strategic tasks that drive value for your organization.
This is where a dedicated supplier team becomes indispensable. By bridging the gap between businesses and travel service providers, a supplier team ensures competitive pricing, superior service quality, and the ability to meet unique corporate travel needs. For TMCs, the supplier team isn’t just another department; it’s the backbone that helps deliver an optimized travel experience for every customer.
In this blog, we’ll explore how the itilite supplier team excels in addressing these challenges and sets itself apart as the best partner for your corporate travel needs.
Challenges faced by the Travel Management Companies (TMC)
Before we begin, let’s first look at the problems that most organizations face concerning corporate travel. After which, we’ll highlight how the supplier team at itilite solves these problems seamlessly.
1. Challenges in Securing and Managing Competitive Rates
Securing competitive rates is a core responsibility for any TMC. However, it remains a significant challenge due to fluctuating market dynamics, time-sensitive corporate bookings, and a complex negotiation process.
Late bookings, often a result of last-minute travel plans, lead to higher costs and fewer options, making it difficult to deliver savings. Even after negotiating deals, maintaining consistent rates across flights, hotels, and car rentals becomes tricky due to supplier-specific policies, limited availability, or inconsistent rate loading.
Moreover, ensuring negotiated rates are accurately loaded into systems like GDS or proprietary platforms is crucial but cumbersome. Errors in rate loading can lead to missed discounts and client dissatisfaction. Additionally, managing coupons or discount codes—often requiring offline intervention for certain suppliers—further complicates the process.
2. Managing Hotel Bookings in a Fragmented Market
For most companies, hotels remain one of the most challenging areas. This is due to their fragmented nature and lack of uniformity in rate structures.
No Special Rates on GDS: Unlike airlines, many hotels do not load special corporate rates onto GDS platforms. This is another challenge that companies face as it requires direct negotiation with individual hotels. And calling up every hotel and negotiating is time-consuming and hectic.
Pain Points During RFP Season: The Request for Proposal (RFP) process for negotiating annual corporate rates with hotels is a significant pain point for TMCs. Many hotels either delay responding or fail to honor their commitments. This leads to missed opportunities for better rates.
Corporate Payments: Organizations often rely on multiple credit cards for travel and expense management, leading to complexities in tracking and reconciling transactions. The process of collating bills from various sources becomes time-consuming and error-prone, further delaying financial reporting. Additionally, the use of multiple cards increases the risk of credit card fraud and unauthorized transactions, posing financial and security concerns.
3. Airline Negotiations and Data Sharing
Partnering with airlines to secure better deals is critical, but it comes with its own set of complexities.
- Finding the Right Contact: Much like hotels, finding the correct point of contact at an airline for negotiations is a major hurdle. This is particularly for regional or specific corporate deals.
- Prism Data Submissions: Airlines often require TMCs to submit Prism data (travel and spending data from clients) for review. Ensuring accurate and timely submissions is essential to negotiating favorable terms, which is a very cumbersome process.
- Monthly Data Review: Airlines rely on monthly travel data to assess the value of their partnerships with TMCs. Companies must collect, organize, and submit this data efficiently. This can be challenging without robust systems in place.
- Other Platform Setups: Integrating airline deals into platforms requires technical expertise and constant coordination, increasing companies’ operational workloads.
How Does the itilite Supplier Team Solve These Problems?
Each of these challenges highlights the operational complexities that TMCs navigate daily. Overcoming these issues requires dedicated supplier management, streamlined processes, and advanced data systems. This is precisely where the itilite supplier team steps in as the ideal travel partner.
Let’s look at how itilite can help you overcome these challenges:
1. Optimize Your Corporate Travel Spends
In today’s fast-evolving travel landscape, saving significantly on travel costs isn’t just about negotiation—it’s about having the right expertise, agility, and a thorough understanding of market dynamics.
At itilite, we bring all this and more to the table, ensuring you get the best rates on hotels, airlines, and car rentals every time.
Why Choose itilite?
We’re Data-Driven Experts
At itilite, data is at the heart of everything we do. We analyze, strategize, and act based on precise insights, ensuring that our recommendations are actionable, accurate, and result-oriented.
Unmatched Rigor
We believe persistence pays off. Our team prepares meticulously, follows up diligently, and doesn’t stop until the process is successfully closed. For us, there’s no such thing as “too many follow-ups” when it comes to delivering results for you.
Strong Supplier Connections
Our extensive network of suppliers ensures that you benefit from exceptional deals, added perks, and unmatched value for your travel spend. Every dollar you invest in travel goes further with itilite.
Boundary-Pushing Problem Solvers
Mid-year RFPs? We make them happen. Massive budgets? Not a prerequisite for great deals. Consolidating volumes? Just one of many ways to save. At itilite, we go beyond conventional methods, delivering creative and effective solutions that challenge the status quo and ensure exceptional results for you.
2. Get the Best Prices, Deals & Benefits for Hotels
At itilite, we bring unmatched expertise in hotel contracting, partnering with over 30,000 properties worldwide. These include renowned brands like Marriott, Hilton, Hyatt, and IHG.
With us, you can save up to 30% on hotel accommodations, even without historical data. Our RFP success rate exceeds 70%, and the typical process timeline is just 9–12 weeks.
Here’s how we make it happen:
- Understanding Your Needs: We start by identifying your preferences, such as specific hotel chains, locations near airports or offices, and must-have amenities like Wi-Fi, breakfast, or meeting spaces.
- Strategic RFP Process: We send targeted RFPs to preferred hotels, brand partners, or new properties aligned with your requirements. As responses come in, we negotiate on key factors like corporate rates, value-added services, cancellation terms, and proximity to key locations. We also consider loyalty program benefits and, when needed, include SLAs to ensure service standards, safety, and specific requests are met.
- Seamless Integration: Once contracts are finalized, the hotels are integrated into the itilite booking platform, allowing your travelers to book effortlessly.
- Ongoing Monitoring: Throughout the contract period, we track hotel performance, traveler feedback, and booking volumes to ensure the properties continue to meet your expectations.
- Folio collections and incidental spending: We also provide dedicated support for folio collections, ensuring that all hotel invoices and receipts are gathered accurately and on time. Additionally, we help centralize incidental spending—such as meals, parking, or other on-site expenses—on special requests.
3. Assistance with Air Travel Savings
Air travel often makes up a large portion of companies’ corporate travel budgets. Therefore at itilite, our contracting capabilities are built to maximize your value. Thanks to strong relationships with Delta, American Airlines, United Airlines, Southwest, and over 40 other carriers, we secure savings of 5-10%, including on international routes!
We help you analyze your past travel trends and future potential by organizing your data in industry-standard formats. This includes top city pairs, RBD classes used, money spent, points earned, and more, which we present to the airline. The airline then assigns the right account manager to your account.
We introduce you to the account manager and facilitate transparent, effective discussions. Moreover, we handle all the follow-ups, necessary form fills, and rate-loading processes. Once the rates are loaded, we conduct rate testing to ensure everything is in order. Then, you’re ready to go!
And you the best part? We don’t shy away from doing RFPs and we dont charge any extra bucks for the extra number of calls done.
And we complete this whole RFP process in about 7-8 weeks. The icing on the cake is we also share the prism data to ensure airlines have your data for performance analysis and this in turn helps you get better future deals.
Make itilite Your Ultimate Travel Partner for Cost-Effective Corporate Travel Solutions
itilite offers you a comprehensive, data-driven approach to corporate travel that maximizes savings and streamlines the entire process. With our industry expertise, strategic partnerships, and commitment to delivering value, we ensure that your travel budget works harder for you.
Ready to drive savings and simplify your corporate travel? Contact itilite today and discover how we can transform your travel management experience!
