Any Corporate Travel Agents who can help.
 

Hello, I apologies if this topic isn’t exactly Travel related but I’m a University student studying a Computer Science degree and my final year project is to develop a Travel Policy Management System. Are there any Business Travel Consultants who could help me with a couple of questions?

The plan is that a large company’s (XYZ Corporation) Travel Manager would use consolidated data as a means to automatically generate a travel policy that is then sent out the travel providers.

So if their discounted or negotiated fares with airline Example Air, being the preferred airline required them to sell 400 passengers New York to London a new Travel Policy would be generated once they had met that target. Making another airline the new preferred carrier.

This would be an automated process, but I don’t want to bore you with those details.

My question 1 is: Is it feasible that a contract between a corporation and the airline which details the negotiated fares and conditions can be formatted in a way that enables me to write a program to import this into a database?

My question 12 is: Do Travel Agents who specialize in corporate travel have systems that would allow the import of a travel policy in electronic format?

Many thanks

asta.org

Good link for you few corporate agents if any post here.
More of a traveler helping traveler site most commercial
agents get bleeped by mods here unless they disguise themselves cleverly and troll very carefully.

linkedin.com flyertalk.com also perhaps

In my experience, corporations big enough to negotiate deals with travel providers (not just airlines, but hotel chains, rental car chains, etc.) have their own travel departments and do not rely on "corporate travel agents."

Those staff specialists will work with counterparts in the marketing departments of the providers, negotiating the deals. Just on the surface it sounds like you're talking about some sort of automated intermediary. It's hard to know what niche in the corporate travel or travel agency business such a system would address. Perhaps mid-size firms too small for their own travel departments? But then it's hard to know how much clout they could carry with the providers who work, after all, in a mass marketing environment.

Thanks qwovadis and gardyloo.

<i>In my experience, corporations big enough to negotiate deals with travel providers (not just airlines, but hotel chains, rental car chains, etc.) have their own travel departments and do not rely on "corporate travel agents." </i>

Huh? My company uses an agency and they even work to negotiate deals. We are a Fortune 500 company. My wife's Global 100 company also works with one of the big agencies. Honestly, between CWT, Amex, etc, I'd wager the vast majority of big companies use an agency.

Besides, what I think the OP is asking for is less an adaptive policy and more an adaptive selection mechanism. As I understand it, what the OP really wants is a mechanism to factor rebates and volume requirements into the selection process.

For example, a company may get an end-of-year kickback from BA if they buy 100 J tickets, of let's say 25%. Most corporate travel agencies, however, would see the sticker price. So, if Delta comes in 10% cheaper than BA on sticker price, the system would guide the traveler to choose Delta, because it isn't smart enough to factor in the discount. This would be especially useful for those businesses that use online booking applications as the primary means of booking travel..

I suspect that such a tool could be pretty useful. I remember booking a ticket for December travel. A couple of different carriers had the same price, but the travel agent begged me to take a specific airline so that we could meet our volume thresholds. They had not done that when I had booked a ticket a couple of months before and I had booked away from the preferred carrier to "save" a few bucks.

I certainly can't offer comparable personal experience, just hearsay from corporate travelers (one of which I haven't been for years) so I will defer on this matter. Good luck to the OP.

Thanks all. This has been very helpful.