Steve Reynolds
This blog post touches on a controversial yet important topic in corporate travel management and will challenge conventional knowledge, question long-standing practices, and may ruffle some feathers.
At the heart of the debate lies the symbiotic relationship between Travel Management Companies (TMCs) and supplier incentives, particularly for hotel bookings. While TMCs argue their value lies in Duty of Care and access to negotiated rates, the reality suggests otherwise. The profit motive—driven largely by commissions and incentives—appears to outweigh corporate cost-saving initiatives, leaving companies and travelers at a disadvantage.
In the dynamic world of corporate travel management, organizations are continuously seeking new ways to optimize their travel spend and ensure compliance without compromising the traveler experience —namely, convenience and personalization.
TMCs have traditionally offered re-shop capabilities to help organizations take advantage of flight and hotel savings, however their overall value tends to differ significantly from more innovative solutions on the market, like Emburse Reshop.
Let’s dive into some key differentiators and learn why Emburse Reshop could be the solution your corporate travel program has been looking for.
The TMC Approach: Commissions Over Real Cost Savings
Traditional TMC re-shop solutions prioritize converting non-commissionable air and hotel rates into commissionable ones. This strategy ensures a steady revenue stream for TMCs which often comes at the expense of true cost savings for the customer. Additionally, many TMCs lack transparency in their reporting of re-shop success, leaving customers uncertain about whether they are truly maximizing their travel budgets. Most importantly, it is very difficult to beat a non-commissioned hotel rate with one that is commissionable as commissions tend to be 10% - 20% of the cost. As a result, TMC solutions only find savings a very small percentage of the time by missing out on the majority of savings found by finding lower fares and rates on both commissionable and non-commissionable bookings. While the TMC service may be free, in reality, the service is providing much more value to the TMC than to the organization.
The Emburse Reshop Difference: Savings at Its Core
Unlike TMCs, Emburse Reshop is purely focused on delivering tangible savings and real business value to customers through fully-automated cost optimization, powered by data and analytics. By continuously scanning for cheaper flights and hotel rates and automatically rebooking them when savings are found (based on requirements set by the customer) Emburse Reshop provides unmatched value that directly benefits organizations and business travelers. Most importantly, the solution is not influenced by supplier incentives and commissions and 100% focused on providing value to the organization.
Emburse Reshop - It’s All In The Numbers:
- Better hotel rates: Searching across alternative hotels finds lower hotel rates 35% of the time, with average savings of $120 per stay.
- Fly for cheaper: Average savings of $64 per flight booking.
- Maximize your travel budget: Organizations using Emburse Reshop and the Emburse Go travel companion app see a 3X increase in actual savings.
- Overall savings potential: Business travelers can save up to 20% on hotels by leveraging Emburse’s benchmarking of travel policies and supplier contracts.
Comprehensive Analytics for Smarter Decision-Making
Emburse Reshop doesn’t just provide significant savings, it also delivers comprehensive analytics including:
- Real-time savings performance from re-shopping to lower fares and rates (both potential and realized). You’ll get immediate insights on how the system is performing and insights to adjust performance to drive more savings if needed.
- Benchmarking travel spend across programs using live, real-time booking data and comparing against peers of similar size.
- Auditing your preferred rates throughout the year instead of an ineffective one-time rate load/availability audits. Immediately identify when rates and fares are not being offered to your travelers either by suppliers or TMCs.
- Immediately obtaining corporate discounts from hotels when identified. With a few clicks, Emburse Source can establish a corporate discount with a preferred hotel and make sure future bookings are at a much lower rate.
This focus on actionable insights allows organizations to continuously refine their travel policies and supplier agreements, ensuring consistent cost reductions over time. Buyers will always be ready to implement additional cost savings based upon corporate need. Companies have complete control over the level of savings required and the impact upon their travelers.
Connecting Travel with Expense for Comprehensive Savings
One of Emburse Reshop’s key strengths is its ability to integrate the entire travel experience, from trip booking to reimbursement. By using Emburse’s mobile solution, Emburse Go, travelers receive lower-rate offers directly within the app. This increases their awareness and acceptance of lower rates and fares at alternative hotels and airlines. Through the app, travelers can also decide whether the re-shop solution should consider alternative properties to save even more money or shift them into a more preferred hotel or flight if the rate decreases below their current booking.
Furthermore, Emburse Reshop is integrated with our end-to-end solution (Emburse Book, Emburse Go, Emburse Expense and Emburse Analytics) to offer:
- Analytics-driven program success: Measure the full impact of your travel program, from booking savings to post-trip reimbursement.
- Compliance through convenience: Empower travelers to make policy-compliant decisions while improving their speed to reimbursement.
- End-to-end cost control: Ensure every booking is audited against travel policies and supplier contracts to maximize discounts and savings.
Enhanced integration is expected soon to allow travelers to control their re-shop settings such as selecting alternative hotels and airlines.
Why Travel Buyers Choose Emburse Reshop
There’s a reason that the majority of the largest companies within the Fortune 100 use Emburse Reshop. Forward-thinking and strategic travel buyers consider Emburse Reshop a game-changing solution that ensures every dollar spent on travel works harder for your organization. By emphasizing customer savings and leveraging industry-leading technology to enhance transparency and efficiency, it delivers unparalleled value in the corporate travel space.
Ready to take your travel program to the next level? Check out Emburse Reshop and discover the future of corporate travel management today.