How Much Implementation Support Do You Need From Your TMC?

Here at AmTrav, we have customer accounts with thousands of employees, and accounts with a handful of employees. You might assume that the larger accounts take up the majority of our time. The truth is, travel support implementation needs are as individual as fingerprints.

How do you know how much support you will need? In other words, how much time will you spend with AmTrav doing your implementation? That depends on how much you prefer to hand off to AmTrav versus how much you prefer to handle. For example, if we use a tool to prepay hotels, it’s a streamlined solution. If your company prefers to prepay all of your hotels, you will need to provide us with a copy of your credit card and employee driver’s license for each booking, so we can manually send each set of booking information to the hotel. That implementation will take longer.

AmTrav is happy to provide training for all of your administrators, coordinators, approvers and travelers. A traditional agency’s standard for onboarding would be eight weeks, whereas the majority of the time, we have our accounts up and running within two weeks, provided we are not waiting on third-party vendors to load in rates and contracts.

Following is detail on the implementations support we provide for our clients:

• We will review your current Travel Policy
• We will learn your approval process decision tree
• We will implement your current Travel Policy into our digital booking tool, or we will advise you on the changes you need to make, ensuring we cover all travel areas of air, car and hotel
• We will build and upload traveler profiles (either separately, as a “shell” profile, or you can send a link to every employee to fill out themselves)
• We will add your current negotiated hotel and airfare rates, direct billing information for cars into our online booking tool
• We will review your current contracts, recommend and facilitate new negotiations with car vendors
• We will add current negotiated rates for hotels into our booking tool, or work to find you new, satisfactory properties, and then negotiate competitive rates with those properties
• AmTrav facilitates sign ups with major carriers for all air business programs; we will add in any current discount or business programs that you may have already
• We will review your options for expense management
• We will review your options for hotel pre-payments
• Once we’ve uploaded all of your negotiated rates with hotel, air and car rental vendors, we will validate each one to ensure accuracy

While Texans may tell you size matters, when it comes to Travel Policy implementations, it’s the complexity that matters. If you have questions about what to expect with your implementation, feel free to call AmTrav at 1-800-795-8371. One of our friendly representatives will be happy to walk you through the process.

Written by: Denise Dorman

Contributions by Kyle M.