Your Travel Programme Is Working. That Doesn’t Mean It Is Managed.
The Unmanaged Layer | Part 1 of 4
Most travel programmes I am asked to look at are not obviously failing. People generally get where they need to be, and that is usually taken as evidence that the programme is working. My interest starts with everything required to make that happen, particularly the decisions and workarounds that never appear in a report.
The signs are usually found in ordinary decisions. A increases while the approver is unavailable, so somebody authorises it by phone. The next time the same situation arises, the team does the same thing. Elsewhere, an EA has stopped using the usual TMC service line because one particular consultant responds more quickly. Nobody regards either decision as a change to the travel programme, but both gradually become part of how it operates.
Months later, what began as a sensible response to a particular situation has become the normal way of getting things done.
How the programme changes when no one is looking
Most organisations I speak to already have the main components in place. There is a Travel Management Company (TMC), a booking tool, a policy and some form of approval process. Preferred suppliers have usually been agreed as well. What can be much harder to explain is how one part affects another when the day-to-day reality no longer follows the original design.
The individual parts may be working perfectly well. The problem is that no one necessarily sees what happens between them.
One office may follow the approved process while another has developed its own way of doing things. The same exception comes up repeatedly, but because it reaches a different person each time, nobody sees a pattern. Useful information exists; it is simply scattered among the people dealing with individual parts of the programme.
Who is joining those things together?
Often, no one has been given that responsibility, or at least, not formally. Decisions are made where the immediate issue arises, and useful knowledge collects in inboxes or remains with the person who dealt with it. The formal process stays much as it was, while the way people actually travel continues to change around it.
When workarounds become the way things are done
Usually, capable people are simply trying to keep the trip moving.
An EA learns which hotel will avoid a complaint and which consultant can deal with a difficult itinerary quickly. When a fare is about to disappear, Finance agrees to approve it afterwards. Before long, the people involved have developed a workable route around the formal process. It solves the immediate problem, although it also makes the underlying weakness harder to see.
I have seen this in executive and VIP travel, in the movement of sports teams and support staff, and within a complex and multi-layered global life-sciences travel programme. The demands were very different, but each environment relied heavily on people who knew how to make things work. Sometimes they did so exceptionally well. The difficulty appeared when that knowledge was needed elsewhere, or when the person holding it was not available.
An isolated direct hotel booking may come down to personal preference. If bookings repeatedly move away from the approved property in the same city, I would want to know why. Perhaps the agreed rate is unrealistic, the location is impractical or the booking channel is not showing travellers what they need. At that point, continuing to approve individual exceptions misses the more useful conversation.
One person rarely sees enough to spot the pattern. A direct hotel booking might only surface when the expense is submitted. Procurement may never hear about it, and the TMC cannot explain a booking that never entered its system. The traveller knows why they went elsewhere, but unless someone asks, that reason stays with them.
Gradually, the process described in the policy bears less and less resemblance to the one people actually use.
Why a supplier review only tells part of the story
When organisations become uneasy about Travel, they tend to begin with the TMC. There is a practical reason for that. Supplier performance is visible and comparatively easy to measure through response times, service levels, fees and account reviews.
A TMC review still tells you only part of the story.
A TMC may be doing exactly what it was appointed to do. Bookings can be serviced well even though the policy behind them is out of date, and accurate reports achieve little if nobody uses them. The same applies to service measures: response-time targets can be met while travellers continue to avoid the approved channel.
That is not necessarily a supplier failure. It is a reminder that supplier performance shows only one part of the programme.
TMC Account teams often end up knowing more about the programme than anyone intended. They see booking behaviour every day and hear about recurring problems from travellers. In an organisation without dedicated travel leadership, that knowledge can gradually turn into responsibility for work that properly belongs on the client side.
Good account teams take some of this on because they are trying to help. The imbalance becomes clear when the organisation wants to assess the programme and discovers that most of the history and context sit with the supplier. The client may receive plenty of information but still lack an independent view of what it means or what should happen next.
Changing supplier will not resolve that. Unless the organisation decides what it needs to own, a new TMC will gradually inherit the same unwritten responsibilities.
The warning signs are easy to miss
They tend to appear in arrangements that everyone has learned to accept:
The policy is technically current, but different teams interpret it differently.
The supplier sets the agenda for its own performance reviews and decides what gets measured.
Reports arrive regularly, but nobody can identify a decision made because of them.
Exceptions are approved one at a time without anyone examining the pattern.
Traveller problems are resolved because a particular person knows who to call.
Individually, these can look like minor operational quirks. However, when several are present, I would want to understand how much of the programme relies on informal knowledge and supplier goodwill. The risk often becomes apparent only after something changes: an account manager moves on, an experienced EA leaves or a disruption exposes information that cannot be found quickly. Until then, capable people may be compensating for the weakness so effectively that leadership has no reason to question the arrangement.
Who is looking across the entirety of the programme
Before discussing systems or suppliers, I would first want an accurate account of how Travel operates today. That includes the unofficial parts: who people call when the usual route fails, where approval really comes from and which exceptions have now become routine.
Can one person explain what happens from the initial request through to booking, servicing, payment and reporting? If not, which parts are invisible to whom? I would also want to know what happened after the last supplier report arrived. If it prompted no decision, its value is questionable however polished it looked.
Spend is part of that picture, but it is the end result of many earlier decisions about policy, approvals, booking behaviour and traveller support. The total tells you what was paid. It says much less about how well the programme was run.
Urgent trips, disruption and exceptions will still occur in a well-managed programme. What changes is the response. People know where a decision should go, the reason is recorded and a recurring issue starts a wider conversation instead of producing another isolated approval.
The organisation arrives at supplier meetings with its own questions and asks for reporting because somebody needs to make a decision. Important knowledge is recorded and shared, rather than being left with whichever individual happens to know the history.
This may sit with a permanent Travel Manager, but it does not have to. The amount of oversight required will depend on the organisation’s scale, complexity and travel patterns. Whatever model is chosen, somebody needs enough visibility and authority to hold the programme together. A supplier, a system and a policy cannot do that on the organisation’s behalf.
The question beneath it all
This series is about that missing layer. I have seen organisations with good suppliers, sensible policies and substantial amounts of data that still could not say who was looking after the programme as a whole.
When the answer has to be assembled from several departments, the TMC and the memory of one experienced EA, I would question whether Travel is genuinely being managed or simply being kept moving.
In Part 2 of The Unmanaged Layer, I will look more closely at that ownership gap: why responsibility for the contract, the budget and the bookings can still leave the travel programme itself without a clear owner.
