For travel management companies and their corporate travel clients

One content source, not one portal per client.

A travel management company with five corporate travel clients in mining, energy or aid work has five client portals to log into, because the content those clients move people on, company aircraft, chartered vessels, ground transport and camps, is not in the GDS. The mid and back office that run the agency were built for one source. Most workflow else is handled by hand on both sides of the coin, and logging into an extra portal is never welcome, which keeps that content orphaned outside the managed programme.

UnityTrip can remove an extra portal from the agent's day. It publishes each client's bookings, changes, approvals, manifests and claims as data, so a mid and back office that can take one more content source receives company-aircraft travel the way it receives air and hotel. The TMC's workflow stays its own. The client's rules stay the client's, executed by the policy engine before the booking reaches the agency.

• No leakage for the corporate travel client. The travel that used to leak around the side, booked by phone and email and seen only when the invoice arrived, is in one record with the commercial travel.
• Clarity of payment for the TMC. Every business booking carries the client's claim number, the approval that says the TMC will be paid, before the booking is made.
• Happier travellers. One consistent, elegant workflow whether they book for themselves or through the agency.

What a TMC can sell with it

• A new kind of account. Mining, energy and aid organisations with their own aircraft and camps have travel their TMC cannot see. A TMC that can take the content source can offer the whole programme, commercial and company-operated, as one managed service.
• A cheaper service on the accounts you have. The agent matches a feed instead of re-keying from a client portal, so the cost per booking falls and the margin on the account rises.
• Self-service and offline without losing the account. Self-service and offline for travellers under the client's policy, with the agency handling the exceptions and keeping the relationship.

What a corporate travel client can ask its TMC for

• The whole fleet inside the managed programme. Company aircraft, vessels, ground transport and camps booked, approved and reported with the commercial travel, in one record.
• Improved service for travellers and support staff at less cost, with the same workflow for self-service and offline.

Self-service and offline added to a workforce operation from its TMC streamlines all sides. Treating it as a content source goes one layer deeper.

Two ways a TMC works with it

• Portal mode, today. The TMC's agents work inside the client's UnityTrip tenant as the client's offline desk, booking and managing company-aircraft and camp content under the client's policy. It works, and it is one portal per client.
• Content-source mode. The tenant feeds the TMC's own mid and back office. Bookings and changes arrive with their approvals, manifests and claim numbers and are matched into the same workflow that handles commercial content. No portal, no re-keying, one queue for every client.

The feed comes from the services the platform already runs on, booking, company rules, approvals and users, with a message bus for orchestration. Connecting them to a back office that can receive the content is days of work, not a project. The parent-and-child pattern underneath both modes is set out on the partners page: the TMC stays the parent for commercial content; UnityTrip holds the company-aircraft leg and hands it back with its policy decisions attached.

What the mid and back office needs

One more content source. Most mid and back offices take the GDS and run everything else with a little-understood lack of automation, which is why TMCs assume that where they are today is all that can be done. It is not. A back office built to accept several sources turns company-aircraft travel from a portal into a feed, and the agency's cost per booking falls with it.

Trans-End, founded by Louis van Zyl in Cape Town, is building exactly this: a mid and back office for travel management companies that takes content from many sources and makes the workflow easy, with its first customers arriving in 2027. Louis has worked at a senior level on both sides of the seam, travel management companies and enterprise ERP, and brought self-service to a workforce operation from the TMC side in an earlier decade. A TMC that wants to know more can be introduced; talk to us.