Introduction

Business travel budgets are minimised and the focus is continually on obtaining best value. So why would you want to use the services of Medway Travel Management, when you already have staff who can make business travel arrangements for you?

To benefit from using  a team of Professional Specialists

Our staff are specialists in every aspect of travel, with years of experience ensuring that we can satisfy your business travel needs more quickly, appropriately, and more cost-effectively than your own staff can.

One of business’s hidden costs is the time wasted by non-experts trying to do expert’s work. For example, would you really put a complex legal case in the hands of an amateur solicitor?

Through:

· years of experience,
· employing only the highest calibre staff,
· an over-riding dedication to exceeding clients’ expectations
· using the very best technology,

Medway Travel Management has consistently shown it is totally committed to provide business travel services that save its clients' time, money and stress.

If you are still not convinced, please see A Modern Myth , where you will find details of some of the dangers of the DIY approach.

Apart from having full and ready access to all the published fares of over 500 international and national airlines, our consultants have access to one of the two largest specially negotiated fare programmes available to Travel Management Companies in the UK. This includes over 10 million fares priced well below the "published fare" prices.

Furthermore, we have the determination to find you the best fare for each trip, by careful research, whilst giving due consideration to the cost of your overall trip and to your convenience.

We do this by researching all viable possibilities and modes of transport, including rail alternatives, "no frills" airlines, city breaks and chartered flights. Sometimes however, the cheapest fare has associated costs which out-weigh the direct saving by, for example, increasing the transfer costs or reducing productive staff time. We will also advise on the relative convenience of the alternative options we will offer you.

You can therefore be sure that your tavel will not cost more than absolutely necessary to meet the requirements and preferences you decide upon.

Corporate clients can also be confident that we will support your organisation's travel policy, by raising with your nominated travel manager any apparent non-conpliances.

Medway Travel Management is nothing if not thorough, as you will see from the comprehensive processes your travel enquiries go through behind-the-scenes.

Initial Research

· We wish to understand fully your requirements – we are not just order-takers!

· We give initial selections of appropriate schedules and fares, researching alternative vendors and routings and give you choices. Implications of alternatives and their related restrictions will be explained.

· We check if you require other services, e.g. Car Rental, Hotels, Ferries, Rail etc.

· You will be provided with a provisional itinerary plan together with check-in and minimum connection times

· Your preferred options will be held and you will receive e-mail/fax/phone details.

· You will be advised of visa requirements, health precautions and any other relevant or necessary destination-specific precautions.

· Your corporate travel policy and individual travellers’ preferences will be checked for compliance.

· Your booking will be flagged for timely review and for your pre-expiry authorisation to ticket.

Making the Booking

· You will be reminded of the need for a decision, before held options expire

· Your changes to plan, if any, will be incorporated into the itinerary, and you will receive final price confirmation.

· If your preferred options are no longer available, we will search for suitable alternatives.

· We produce the final itinerary and seek your confirmation

· Your special requirements/preferences will be double checked – seating, diets, non-smoking hotel rooms etc.

· We will pay for any specially negotiated tickets obtained from 3rd parties.

· We will quality check all details prior to issuing documents

· Your documents, e-tickets or tickets on departure will be sourced/issued.

· We will arrange the dispatch / delivery of any hardcopy documents by the most appropriate method.

· The cost of your trip will be billed to your company’s account.

. Your airtickets will be guaranteed against airline failure, up to a limit of £1500 per ticket.

· Your hotel / car rental bookings will be confirmed by fax and, if you require “bill-back”, the vendor will be provided with our credit card as the guarantee.

· The whole of the above process is covered by ISO 9001/2008 certified Quality Assurance procedure.

Other travel services you may value

· Emergency assistance e.g. rebooking missed flights, out-of-hours changes.

· Provision of Car Parking, Foreign Currency / Travellers’ Cheques and Travel Insurance

· Last minute advice re cancelled or re-scheduled flights.

· Our scrutiny of hotel and car rental invoices billed back to Medway Travel Management, including the querying of inconsistencies and conversion of corrected bills into Medway Travel invoices for your account.

· Your having a single travel vendor account to administer, in place of a multiplicity.

· Your staff is kept up-to-date on travel industry developments

Other services which you may wish to use on occasion

· Our processing and negotiating refunds from vendors for your cancelled and unused tickets

· Negotiation of compensation for lapses in vendor service quality

· Negotiation of preferential deals with vendors on your behalf, and the management of them.

· Advice on the formulation of a corporate travel policy for your organisation.

· Provision of on-line travel management information

· Provision of general travel industry information via our monthly newsletter, on-line or mailed, and more immediate news and special offers via our “Medway Travel Express” e-mail.

· Provision of your own flight, fare research and on-line self-booking facilities.

· Review meetings with you, to ensure our on-going understanding of your changing needs and to ensure the required service level is being maintained.

Critical internal procedures

· Corporate and personal profiles are constantly updated

· IT systems are carefully maintained and frequently improved and updated

· Medway Travel Management staff are subject to on-going refresher training

· Medway Travel is bonded to travel industry regulations for clients’ protection

All this is surely great value!!

If you wish to know more about any of the above, or any other aspects of Medway Travel’s services please contact us.

 

As an independent travel management company, we are able to advise our clients impartially and without the pressure of any "Corporate" influences.

We are an owner managed company and are therefore well placed to understand the challenges of controlling overheads which our clients face. We are able to join with them in managing the significant cost of UK and Overseas travel, having regard to the travel policy and aspirations of each individual client.

Our decision tree is short, enabling changes in policy or new ideas to be implemented rapidly.

We are, by comparison to our global competitors, small, which means each of our clients is important to us. But to ensure we are able to offer competitive solutions in all markets, we are members of the "Focus Partnership".

The Focus Partnership

Formed in 1999 this Group of some eighty members, was created to bring together the individual benefits of owner managed and smaller independent travel management companies, and at the same time, by acting as a united group, negotiate with travel vendors on a similar footing to the largest players in the market, utilising the full weight of our combined turnover of some £500 million pa.

The requirements for membership are stringent to ensure that creditability is maintained with our partner vendors and in the industry in general.

These requirements included

• IIP Recognition
• ISO 9001
• ATOL Licensed
• High level of travel expertise

 

The benefits to our clients are numerous but include:-

• The most comprehensive negotiated fares database in the UK comprising some 60 separate airline contracts (offering the guarantee that we can never be knowingly undersold) offering over 12 million such fares at any one time.
• The fastest delivery of fares, known as CAT35. Our group has the leading technology in this field. (As airlines release special fares they become available to our consultants almost instantaneously).
• A hotel reservation system for use by clients directly or by our consultants giving superior rates and the facility to have any reservation charged back to your account.
• An Online Booking Tool that is cost effective, accurate and available at negligible cost. Through this technology we can also monitor bookings made by clients direct and intervene if necessary.
• A turnover of £500M, putting us in the top three UK buyers of travel and the associated benefits to our clients

Summary

In summary, by being privately owned and managed we can understand and address our client's needs whilst our membership of the focus partnership gives us all the fares, rates and tools to put us in a world class position to provide you with the best  possible service.

Are you arranging your own travel? – It seems easy, doesn’t it?

One can of course do it in-house – or allow the travellers to arrange their own.

But do they really know what is best?

By allowing your staff to do it themselves, you may well miss the following benefits provided by a professional Travel Management Company:

· Obtaining consistently good value fares (the cheapest fare is not necessarily the best logical one)

· Consideration of the overall trip costs and not just the fare

· Knitting tightly together all the different elements of a trip

· Provision  of alternatives, including different modes of transport, and advice on the pros and cons of each

· Provision of professional support to eradicate problems

· The saving of a great deal of bookers time - which research suggests can frequently cost £30 - £50 per trip

Further, Travel Management Companies:

· Help to ensure travel policy compliance

· Take staff security into account

· Keep clients up to date on travel industry developments

· Draw clients’ attention to wider potential benefits

· Provide analysable management information to promote even more efficient travel arrangements.

If you make your own arrangements, you’ll suffer the disadvantages associated with “do-it-yourself” booking, which include:

•  
  • A practical inability to see all the fares available
  • An inability to hold the best fares while checking that the trip is viable/acceptable to the traveller and the people at the other end
  • Possible inadequate understanding of fare restrictions leading on occasion, to additional costs
  • Conscientious staff trying to save pennies on the cost of a fare may fail to get the best value tickets
  • Research time of your staff is likely to cost £30 - £50 per transaction
  • You will have less leverage with vendors for price advantage and problem resolution
  • And you will miss out on those services that add so much to overall efficiency, by not having:
    • The ability to monitor and enforce travel policy compliance
    • An “out of hours” support service if things go wrong at inconvenient times
    • A complete picture of where members of staff are at any moment
    • Control of your “duty of care” for employees
    • Management information which provides control of travel arrangements and spend.

Conclusion

Just as you would be unlikely to put a complex legal case in the hands of an amateur lawyer to save the fees, we suggest you should think twice before allowing your staff to "Do-it-Themselves". The cost may be higher than you thought!